Over the past couple of weekends, Ryan Blaney had been doing well on the race track, inching closer to the championship race at Phoenix. He finally was able to secure himself a spot in the final four after winning the race at Martinsville on Sunday.
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Following the race, a reporter at the press conference asked Ryan about his recent success, stating that he seemed to have found Jimmie Johnson’s lucky horseshoe, also acknowledging that Ryan’s performance had been strong and asked what had been the turning point for his team.
The Team Penske driver was not exactly impressed, saying, “What’s been lucky about it? I don’t think anything’s been lucky about it. Last three weeks we’ve been running amazing.”
Blaney also said that his team has performed well in previous races, including running toward the front in Vegas, having a good shot to win in the last laps at Homestead, and winning the race at Martinsville. He believes that their success is not solely due to luck, although there may be fortunate moments.
“I don’t think there’s any luck that it goes into this. Yeah, there may be lucky moments, but I don’t think the horseshoe is really true at all. We’ve worked really hard to get to the point that we need to at speed and our group has executed very good races and they deserve to be here…”
“You can interpret luck how you want but the performance side, you still have to bring fast race cars, race cars keep putting off to win and we’ve done that. So I think that is the biggest thing apart or you know about our success is everyone’s done a good job of figuring out how to get better and where to be better and then applying it and having fast cars so yeah,” concluded the #12 driver.
Blaney wins at Martinsville to lock himself in the championship four
Early into the race, it may have felt that Denny Hamlin would cruise to victory with next to no competition. However, after the conclusion of stage 1, Hamlin saw the haunting sight of Ryan Blaney’s bumper closing up on him. One thing led to another and Blaney was able to pass Hamlin for the lead.
Thereafter, all Blaney had to do was keep his car ahead and race to the checkered flag. Despite Hamlin trying his level best to gain an advantage on Blaney, the JGR driver was not able to and in the end, it was the win that made the transfer for the Team Penske driver.
Heading into the championship four race, if Blaney is able to execute a similar performance, we might even see him win his first-ever championship. But the competition at Phoenix would be hard, as the likes of Kyle Larson, Christopher Bell, and William Byron have been in incredible form themselves.
