By David Morgan, Associate Editor
Ryan Blaney finally found some respite in what has been a season of discontent for he and his No. 12 Team Penske team.
A fifth-place finish in Sunday’s Goodyear 400 at Darlington snaps a skid of five straight races without a top 10 finish – three of which were 28th or worse – but his day was heading to an even better result before a caution with three to go derailed his charge to the lead.
The final green flag pit stop cycle seemed that it would play right into the hands of Blaney and his team when they pitted with 46 laps to go in regulation, some four laps later than the leaders at the time the pit cycle started.
Returning to the track in 16th place, Blaney would have a deficit of a little more than 17 seconds to the leader, Tyler Reddick.
But as daunting of a task at that seemed to be, Blaney had a rocket of a race car underneath him and set out on the task of charging to the front.
10 laps after setting out on his quest, Blaney had climbed into the top-10 and knocked nearly three seconds off the gap to Reddick. With 25 laps left on the board, that deficit had fallen to 8.7 seconds.
As the laps ticked away, Blaney dispatched car after car, clawing away at Reddick’s lead before he ascended to second-place with 15 laps to go and a five-second gap between him and the lead.
In short order, Blaney caught up to Reddick and finally passed him off Turn 2 with four laps to go. But just as he was about to set sail, the dreaded caution flag he did not want to see flew after Kyle Larson spun following contact from Bubba Wallace.
“That’s convenient, isn’t it,” Blaney quipped over the radio when told of the circumstances that had brought out the caution.
The race would be headed into overtime, but before that, all of the leaders made their way down pit road for fresh Goodyear rubber.
Unfortunately for Blaney, pit road had been his team’s Achilles heel all day and he would fall to fourth after a blazing fast pit stop from Denny Hamlin, along with Reddick and William Byron getting out in front of him in the shuffle.
On the ensuing overtime restart, Blaney just couldn’t find a clear lane to try and take a shot at getting back to the lead and would have to settle for a fifth-place finish. A good rebound to stop the skid of the last month, but still not the result he and his team were hoping for.
“I’m proud of the effort that we had. I’m obviously disappointed in the result,” Blaney said.
“I thought we could have won the race and had a good shot at winning the race. We did the last run perfectly. I thought our pit call was fantastic and our car was fast enough to stay. It had a lot of speed in it late, but a late yellow and then lost the lead off pit road.
“We didn’t even get to start on the front row and you’re not gonna go from fourth to first in a green-white-checkered here, so it just wasn’t meant to be, but proud of the effort.”
Blaney added that had the caution not fallen the way it did, he was confident it would have been him and his team celebrating the win instead of Hamlin stealing it at the end.
“If the caution didn’t come out, I thought we had it won easily,” he said. “We were so much faster on newer tires. It was a great strategy call running long.
“Those guys short pitted and they were struggling real bad, and I thought if we could have just got off of two with the lead and the caution didn’t come out, I thought I was gonna kind of ride off into the sunset.
“That’s just not how it worked, unfortunately. We lost the lead on pit road, lost a front row starting spot and never had a shot.”
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