Ryan Blaney’s 2025 season has been about as enjoyable as stepping on a Lego in the dark. Thirteen races, five DNFs, two third-place finishes, and one headache after another. But Sunday night at Nashville Superspeedway, the fog lifted. Blaney finally parked it in Victory Lane—becoming the last of Team Penske’s trio to notch a win this year, and looking thoroughly relieved to be done playing bridesmaid.
“I never gave up hope, that’s for sure,” Blaney said. “We’ve had great speed all year, just hasn’t been the best year for us as far as good fortune. The 12 boys are awesome; they stick with it no matter how it goes, and it was great to finish one out tonight.”
It wasn’t easy. Blaney spent much of the final stage trying to thread a very fast needle through traffic thicker than a Tennessee buffet line. During a grueling 102-lap green flag run to close out the race, lap-down cars were everywhere—first holding him up, then slowing everyone chasing him. Once clear, he built a 2.8-second cushion over Carson Hocevar and didn’t look back.
Hocevar had his own problems. He got together with Ricky Stenhouse Jr. early in Stage 2, a skirmish that was more “whoops” than “war,” but still threw his race off-script.
“It just proves how strong this group is to go from the disappointment last week to having a really bad qualify draw, qualifying really bad and sticking through it and having a shot,” Hocevar said. “A shot, like a straightaway.”
And then there was Denny Hamlin—racing in his 700th Cup Series start and sweating like a sinner in church. He led 79 laps and won Stage 1, but then lost the air hose for his helmet and hydration system. No cold air. No water. Just the early summer Tennessee heat and a concrete speedway reminder that race cars are basically convection ovens with wheels. He still finished third, but probably drove straight to a Gatorade cooler and then a phone charger to check if his fiancée had gone into labor yet.
“It was hot,” said Hamlin looking for a nomination for understatement of the year. “I don’t run a cool shirt or anything like that, so that’s three elements that the other drivers had that I didn’t have. So yeah, I got hot.
“Carson Hocevar, the helmet visor up there, to try to get a little air in. But just couldn’t run with the 12 there in the super long run. After 40 laps I could maintain with him, but after that he just pulled away and would stretch it on us.”
Behind them, Joey Logano and William Byron rounded out the top five. But getting there required dodging an absolute minefield of mayhem—most of it in Stage 2.
The second stage was a mess, with a track-record four cautions and enough mangled sheet metal to open a small scrapyard. Things kicked off on lap 107 when Hocevar and Stenhouse had their dust-up. Seven laps later, Alex Bowman got squirrelly coming out of Turn 4, clipped Noah Gragson, and slammed the wall. A few laps after that, Christopher Bell—who seems to either love Nashville or want to burn it down—was fifth but pinched Erik Jones into Turn 1. Jones held his ground, and Bell got sent spinning into the Turn 2 wall like a used carousel horse.
Then came Corey Heim. In a 23XI car, filling the “promising development driver” role, Heim misjudged his Turn 4 exit and slid directly into Brad Keselowski’s path. It went poorly. Heim spun into the wall and joined the early exits alongside Stenhouse and Gragson.
23XI Racing’s night looked doomed from the jump. Bubba Wallace got popped for speeding during the first round of green flag stops. Tyler Reddick, who finished third here last year, caught a flat on lap 126, lost a lap, got it back, then pitted again to double-check they had the right tire. It dropped him to 36th.
But in true Toyota grit fashion, both drivers clawed back. Wallace finished sixth. Reddick? Ninth. Between them were Jones in seventh and Kyle Larson—who had a pit crew doing surgery under the hood like it was a MAS*H unit—battling back from 36th to eighth. Bell, somehow, bounced back from his spin to round out the top ten.
Stage 2 went to Hamlin, but the final stage went uninterrupted—a marathon of green flag laps and relentless strategy. Blaney’s crew hit their marks. He hit his lines. And the rest, finally, was peaceful silence.
Next week, it’s on to Michigan, where Tyler Reddick is the defending winner. But if this race is anything to go by, the only thing predictable about this season… is that nothing is.
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.