BRISTOL, Tenn. – Kyle Larson dominated Sunday’s Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway, proving that outpacing him would require both speed and strategy. Ryan Blaney and the No. 12 Team Penske crew took that challenge head-on with an aggressive call in the race’s final stage.
Opting to stretch their fuel run in Stage 3, Blaney stayed on track while others pitted, briefly putting the entire field a lap down with less than 100 laps remaining. However, with no caution to reset the field and a fuel stop inevitable, the defending Cup Series champion brought his No. 12 Richmond Water Heaters Ford Mustang to pit road on Lap 439 for tires and enough fuel to finish the race.
He returned to the track in ninth, still on the lead lap, and quickly began charging forward on fresher tires. In the final 50-lap green flag run, Blaney methodically climbed to sixth and passed William Byron for fifth with eight laps remaining.
Though he closed in on Chase Briscoe for fourth, Blaney ran out of time to complete the pass, ultimately settling for a hard-earned top-five finish.
“It was just kind of a learning thing all day,” Blaney said of the race. “The first run of the race nobody really knew what the tires were going to do and everyone kind of just rode around there a little bit and we finally got going and we went so long.
“Then it was like, ‘Alright, we can go a little bit harder.’ The track widened out, which was good. I honestly don’t know if I really anticipated that with the track getting wide and really not having tire problems. I’m glad that’s the way it was.”
While Larson went largely unchallenged up front, Blaney said Sunday was still an enjoyable race from his perspective — especially with a strategy in play and something to fight for in the closing laps.
“I think it put on a pretty decent race,” added Blaney. “There were a lot of comers and goers, except for the lead, I guess, but it was a pretty fun day and a really good finish.
“We kind of took a chance of running really long there, seeing if we’d get a caution and then we finally bailed and had to make all the ground up and got back to fifth. Overall, it was a solid weekend.”
Even the gamble to stay out longer than any other car on Sunday didn’t work out as intended, Blaney still insisted it was the right call.
“It was worth it,” he said. “I thought it was a good move just in case someone blew a tire or something, but for a while we had everybody lapped and that was the long shot play to try and win the race.
“I was fifth before that cycle started, so it was nice that we got back up there for how long we ran. I didn’t have a ton of laps to make it back up, but, overall, it was a good call by Jonathan. It was the chance to catch a break and it didn’t really come, but it was a good weekend.”
Blaney also knew the bold strategy call by crew chief Jonathan Hassler was likely his only shot at stealing the win from the dominant Larson.
While the caution he needed never came, Blaney still made the most of the call, charging back through the field on fresh tires to score his third top-five of the season.
“Running long right there was really our only play to win,” explained Blaney. “We were running fifth before the cycle started, so why not take a shot? I thought I did a really good job of saving my tires to make sure I didn’t have a problem.
“We went really, really long. I had a lot of people lapped for a while and hung on pretty strong, and then we finally decided to pit and got back to fifth. I had third and fourth right in front of me, so it almost played out even better than what it did.
“It was a good weekend and a good call by Jonathan to have a shot to try to do something different but it just didn’t work out.”
Blaney’s fifth-place finish on Sunday marked back-to-back top-five efforts for the No. 12 Team Penske group. One week earlier at Darlington Raceway, he surged to the front in the closing laps of the Goodyear 400 and appeared poised for his first win of the season.
But a late caution sent the race into overtime, and Blaney lost the lead on the green-white-checkered restart, ultimately finishing fifth.
Motivated to finish what he started, Blaney came to Bristol determined — and nearly executed a bold strategy to perfection.
But with the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports team firmly in control, the gamble fell short. Still, Blaney walked away with his third top-five finish of the 2025 season — and another strong step forward in consistency.
“Honestly, our cars have been really good and I’m happy to where our speed has been,” sounded Blaney.
“We had just a few bad weeks of not finishing the race from motor problems and getting caught up in a wreck. The last two weeks of just having good races. We had a car that could win last week and it just really didn’t work out.
“Today, I might have been able to run third, but I thought about third through sixth or seventh is where I was gonna be and just really proud that we had a couple weeks that were just like a normal race and we finished where we were running, so that part is always good.”
Follow Chris Knight on X (Twitter) @Knighter01 or email at [email protected].
