By Roy J. Akers-www.skyviewsports.com and Ford Performance
Ryan Blaney speaks to the media including myself and his last lap loss to Tyler Reddick after he passed Denny Hamlin on the final lap has him reflecting on his Miami-Homestead race loss. A loss that very well may keep him from the Final Four next weekend in Phoenix.
Ryan Blaney’s mind has fully shifted to Sunday’s Round of 8 elimination race at Martinsville Speedway, but the defending champ hasn’t forgotten about his final-lap, final-turn decision last week at Homestead that cost him a guaranteed spot in the Championship 4.
After grasping the lead from Denny Hamlin with two laps to go, Blaney was pressured by Tyler Reddick down the backstretch and had to make a quick decision on whether to defend the top or block the bottom to deter a potential slide job from the No. 45 driver and 2024 regular-season champion. Blaney chose the latter but Reddick ripped the fence on two-lap older tires to speed past Blaney in Turns 3 and 4 to steal the victory and punch his ticket to Phoenix.
It was a dream tug left at the wheel for Reddick while Blaney was left pondering what could’ve been in the hours after the race.
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“I rewatched it when I got home Sunday night,” Blaney said. “I rewatched the whole race and rewatched the end of it and lost some sleep over the end of that race. I mean, it’s so easy to go back and watch it from the broadcast or relive it in your head of like ‘well, gosh, if I just would have done this different, it would have been a different outcome.’ But that’s easy to do, like, in the moment, it’s really hard to make the right decision. You’re making a lot of decisions every lap and I look back on that, and I talk about in some scenarios, whether it’s speedways or end of these races whether you’re leading or second or whatever, you’re guessing. In some situations, on what lane is going to be better, where the car in front of you is going to go, where the car behind you is going to go, you’re guessing. And sometimes you guess right, sometimes you guess wrong. I guessed wrong on where he was going to go.”
All sports, and especially in racing, require a lot of split-second decision-making. While looking back at the tape Blaney became a viewer, just like fans at home, asking himself why he made the choice to go to the bottom when the best move would’ve been to defend the top.
“I can only speak on pro sports because I am a part of one and I watch a lot of others, and it’s like, when I watch a football game, I’m like, ‘why didn’t he just do that?’ … In the moment, when you’re that person and you’re that athlete, or living in that time, it’s so much harder than being on the outside and watching on TV with all different angles and things like that. You’re making real-time decisions in the moment. You don’t have any time to like process, think about it, go through all the options. It’s boom, boom, boom. It’s all happening super fast.
“You’re never going to be batting 1.000 for making the right decision, the right call and that’s what the difficulty of sporting is, is can you make the right decisions? And how often do you make the right decisions? In my mind, going down the back, I’m seeing the run that he’s got down the back, and the timing of it, I’m like, ‘OK, I think he might pull a slider here.’ That’s what I kind of made my mind up on is that he was going to pull a slider and I was just going to kind of enter where I did and slide up the track. If he did pull a slider, maybe I can pull under him or where I kind of entered I was like ‘well, I’m going to cut a little distance off the race track here to where maybe I can still be on his outside if he did pull a slider and I can drive back around him.’ It was just the wrong move.”
Instead of having a fun, relaxed day as one could have at a tough track like Martinsville, Blaney will now have to fight for a checkered flag if he wants to keep his title defense alive as he’ll enter Sunday’s Xfinity 500 (2 p.m. ET, NBC, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App) 38 points below the elimination line.
The upside for the No. 12 Team Penske team is that both Chase Elliott (2020) and Christopher Bell (2022) have won at Martinsville entering beneath the elimination line, proving it can be done. Elliott would win the title in ’20, and Blaney himself is the defending winner of the Martinsville playoff race, which rocketed him to last year’s championship.
Not only will Sunday be a physical hurdle for Blaney along with making the right adjustments all weekend long, but it also will be a mental challenge the rest of the week and until the season ends potentially to move on from how Homestead played out.
“I feel like the mental side is the toughest thing about our sport,” Blaney said. “It’s just how do you mentally stay in it and how do you adjust to what you need to do week in, week out and in the moment, and then for the future. So I try not to dwell on the past too much, and you just learn from it and move on.”
Roy J. Akers is a multi-media reporter and covers several sports for www.skyviewsports.net