How Ryan Blaney finally got the job done to win Nashville

Ryan Blaney has had an up-and-down season so far in 2025. Usually known for his consistent and clean driving style that keeps him out of trouble, the Ohioan has struggled to even reach the finish through the first 13 races with five retirements; for comparison, from 2021 to his championship-winning 2023 campaign, he had just three DNFs each year. Four of his exits were due to crashes as well, rather than being a victim of poor reliability.

After a stinker at last week’s Coca-Cola 600, he was surely relieved to get things sorted out on Sunday. Blaney led 139 of 300 laps and won a stage en route to the Cracker Barrel 400 victory, marking his first triumph at Nashville Superspeedway.

Although he qualified 15th, Blaney quickly moved through the field and led six laps before finishing Stage 1 in seventh. A caution-filled Stage 2 ended with Blaney leading the final 20 laps to earn himself a playoff point.

The third and final leg became one of pit strategy as teams tried to figure out when to make their stop and maximise their position. Blaney surrendered the lead on Lap 247 to pit, cycling the top spot through the likes of Denny Hamlin, Austin Dillon, and Team Penske colleague Austin Cindric.

Brad Keselowski pitted on Lap 268 to complete green-flag stops, with Blaney once again leading the way. With 32 laps to go, he admitted he was racing with some paranoia that a crash would occur.

“I was waiting for a yellow. I figured this was coming and we were going to have to defend a restart,” Blaney explained. “But you just keep making laps. You just keep doing it. My spotter (Tim Fedewa) counts me down laps and everything like that. As a driver when you’re leading the race, you’re always expecting something to happen, especially when you have a comfortable lead.”

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Fortunately, that accident never came. On the other hand, he couldn’t afford to play it safe either with Carson Hocevar, his polar opposite in terms of driving style, chasing him down.

Considered a bit of a hotshot by fans, Hocevar was seeking his first win at the highest level. While the NASCAR Cup Series sophomore’s fast and aggressive nature led to contact with Ricky Stenhouse Jr. that knocked the latter out of the race, it also helped him pass Hamlin as he began to sniff out Blaney. Despite Hocevar’s efforts, he could not gain enough ground as Blaney pulled away to win by 2.830 seconds.

The victory is Blaney’s first of 2025 and the 14th of his career. Given how things have been this season, he’s glad to be assured a playoff spot at the halfway point of the regular season.

“Just been pretty rocky this year and had a lot of misfortune and a lot of down times, just crappy things happening to us,” Blaney noted. “It’s like, ‘Man, what do we got to do to just finish these races or close one out and just kind of things go our way?’

“I think that was more… I don’t want to say relief, but just like, ‘Okay, finally nothing crazy happened and we were able to just run our own race and bring the speed and execute and do our job very, very well.’ It was nice to finally get in Victory Lane tonight after a rocky start to the year.”

Relief for Penske after Indy 500 drama

Not to discount his NASCAR team, but if you told Roger Penske that division’s drivers would all win a race before any of his IndyCar Series guys, he probably would have scoffed at you. While Álex Palou and Kyle Kirkwood are destroying everybody by winning all seven IndyCar races to date, Penske’s triumvirate of Scott McLaughlin, Josef Newgarden, and Will Power have been disappointing so far. Power sits fifth in points with just a podium as does the eighth-placed McLaughlin, while Newgarden began the season with a third but has not finished higher than ninth since and is currently an uncharateristically abysmal 13th in the standings.

On the stock car side, Blaney’s win means all four Penske drivers have now visited a NASCAR Cup Series Victory Lane in 2025. Incidentally, the flagship team also struggled to find their groove at the start of the season. Josh Berry from Penske affiliate Wood Brothers Racing ended up being the first of the quartet to win, doing so at Las Vegas in March. A month later, Austin Cindric won for Team Penske at Talladega before Joey Logano did so the following week at Texas.

Despite not winning until June, Blaney was more consistent in his finishes which put him higher than the other three in the championship. Of course, his Nashville victory finally got him into the winner’s club for 2025. Cindric and Logano were certainly pleased with the result, and went to Victory Lane to congratulate their team-mate.

“We’ve always supported each other,” said Blaney. “No matter really who wins, if you can go see them in Victory Lane, you do. If not, you’ll see them on the plane that night and you always talk and cut up with each other. I think we have this unique relationship in the Penske building that’s just expected by Roger of, ‘We are Team Penske. We are one team, and we support each other, and we share all this information.’

“When one team runs good, you try to share stuff from that team of what made them good, let’s try to focus on this car, and it’s just an open pool. I don’t know other teams, but I just don’t see other teams doing that as well as we do. We utilise our four-car team really well and the drivers have great relationships, crew chiefs have great relationships.

“We’re always supporting each other, and you want to win yourself and you want to win for your team, but you’re also happy for Roger and everybody who is affiliated with the #2 (Cindric) or #12 or #22 (Logano) or #21 (Berry) just to have their hands on everything that they get to be successful, as well. That’s how we’ve always been.”

The strong outing also surely comes as a fresh sigh of relief for everyone at the team. Amidst the IndyCar programme’s struggles, things reached their nadir in May when Newgarden and Power lost their Indianapolis 500 qualifying results because of illegally modified attenuators. Newgarden had won last year’s Indy 500 with the same infraction.

The fallout from the controversy led to team president Tim Cindric, the father of Austin, being fired before the 500. Power was Penske’s highest finishing driver in the race with a paltry 16th, while Newgarden and McLaughlin failed to finish. Even the NASCAR guys had a tough Memorial Day weekend: a few hours after the 500, Berry beat his Penske colleagues in the Coca-Cola 600 with a 12th to Logano’s 16th, Cindric’s 31st, and Blaney’s 38th after he crashed.

The IndyCar drivers are still trying to find their footing, though things seem to be trending up with Power just missing the podium in Detroit the same day as Nashville.

“I hate it for those folks over there last week at Indy,” Blaney continued. “For those guys to have to go through that, the people that got let go were really prominent figures in the company, it definitely stunk.

“On our side, we just focused on what we were doing. RP told us all, ‘Things happen, and we’ve done things about them, and we’re going to move forward. What’s the next step and how do we move on from this?’

“We had to hear all week that Penske cars are bad because the IndyCar guys got caught and that’s why we were bad at Charlotte, and then we come here tonight and kick everyone’s ass. Ebbs and flows of this sport. It’s crazy, but it’s nice.

“I’m excited to talk to Roger because it’s been a tough couple weeks for him, and I’m really excited to talk to him on the phone tonight and kind of share some joy with him.

NASCAR 2025 Cracker Barrel 400 – Results