Blaney is looking to reignite winning momentum at Pocono
LONG POND, Pa. – The last time we saw Ryan Blaney, he was on fire. Well, his car was on fire. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The engine in Blaney’s No. 12 Ford blew up in spectacular fashion during last Sunday night’s Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, turning the car into a fireball and filling the cockpit with smoke. In an era when fire is relatively rare in NASCAR, it was a jarring moment.
Blaney wasn’t injured, but the incident got his attention. From the moment the engine failed, he was concentrating on getting out of the car.
“You just try to get stopped,” he said. “You can’t see nothing. You try to get stopped as quick as you can and get out of the thing. They asked me if I pulled the pin (on the in-car fire extinguisher), but I was just trying to get out of the thing. I couldn’t see it regardless. But I smelled like smoke the next two days.”
On Friday, Blaney was blazing in a different sort of way. He won the pole for Sunday’s Pocono 400 at Pocono Raceway with a speed of 176.897 mph in the first step toward repeating his victory here last June.
Driving for the Wood Brothers team last year, Blaney scored the first and only Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series win of his career by edging Kevin Harvick by 0.139 of a second.
“Obviously your first win is special,” Blaney said after his victory, “and to do it with the Wood Brothers and at a place where I vividly remember coming and watching my dad (former Cup driver Dave Blaney) race here so much is really special as well.”
Blaney will battle Harvick again Sunday as the five-time winner in 2018 starts alongside him on the front row. Jamie McMurray, Martin Truex Jr. and Kyle Busch, who has four wins this season, round out the top five qualifiers.
Blaney has had an odd season in his first year with Team Penske. He is third in laps led (418) to Kyle Busch (875) and Harvick (820), but he’s only 11th in points. He has had six top-10 finishes in 13 races, but his worksheet has been stained by three DNFs (did not finishes) — crashes at Bristol and Kansas and the blown engine at Charlotte.
Because of the poor finishes at Bristol (35th), Kansas (37th) and Charlotte (36th), Blaney is 30th in laps completed.
“We have struggled the last couple of races after having fast cars,” he said. “That is almost like an extra slap in the face when you have fast cars and have problems like that. It just makes it that much worse. The good news is we do have fast cars right now, and it is a matter of putting everything together, from not getting into accidents to braking.
“We need to get on the right track here. We are poised to do that. We have a good group of people on this 12 team. It is a matter of getting the monkey off our back. We have two good tracks for us in Pocono and Michigan where we typically run pretty decent and have fast cars.”