Team Penske had a pretty good Sunday on the track. In Iowa Penske driver Will Power charged to a win for the IndyCar side of the house. A few hours later Ryan Blaney capped off the day with a win at Pocono Raceway holding off Denny Hamlin and taking his second win of the season.
“I think things are just kind of falling into place for us,” said Blaney whose first win of the season came at Iowa just 4 races ago. “I feel like we have gotten to a great place on speed in the last two months, especially. I feel like we honestly had a couple races slip away from us which I thought we had a good shot at winning.”
It was another chess match of the type that Pocono is famous for. Teams used varying fuel plans with some short pitting, with others looking for Stage points. Some took two tires, others four, some waited on a full fuel load, others didn’t.
At the end of it all it was checkmate for Blaney.
The winning strategy for Blaney came when he pitted prior to the end of Stage 2. Hamlin, however, elected to stay out and win the Stage. Hamlin pitted during the stage break taking him out of the lead and out of control of the race after leading 31 laps.
Blaney was gifted a bit of luck shortly after the start of the final stage.
During the pace laps, when teams came down pit road to check their pit road speeds, nearly all the field was told they had been speeding in section 7, the section just past the start-finish line. During the race only two cars were caught speeding Todd Gilliand, and Corey LaJoie. It wasn’t until a caution that started in lap 188 when ironically Gilliland hit the wall, that Section 7 changed the race for four drivers.
Kyle Larson, Chase Elliott, Ty Gibbs, and Daniel Suarez were all nailed for speeding during stops after the race’s fifth caution. Larson came out with the lead, Elliott third. All four drivers were forced to the back of field with Larson giving up the presumptive lead of the race. Meanwhile Blaney had come out second and inherited the lead.
Once he had the lead, and clean air, Blaney would become the car to beat. There would be three more cautions with the final one coming for polesitter Ty Gibbs who lost an engine ending his day after leading 21 laps early in the going.
The final restart came with 23 laps to go. As last week’s winner Alex Bowman, and Hamlin, a seven-time winner at Pocono raced side by side for second, Blaney was able to start to stretch out his lead.
“It was nice to stick to the plan today,” Blaney said. “And our plan was to have track position at the end. I knew our car was fast enough.”
Alex Bowman, looking for consistent speed, finishes third at Pocono after breakthrough win
Hamlin would grab second with 7 laps to go but was never able to close the gap and settled for second 1.3 seconds behind Blaney.
“Track position is such a big thing,” Hamlin said. “When the 12 jumped on that stage that we won, that put them in front of us. Certainly, was going to be hard to pass. Not just enough laps of green there towards the end.”
Bowman was third. William Byron and Joey Logano rounded out the top five.
The garage area was littered with a total of 13 cars who failed to finish. Among the DNFs were Ross Chastain who spun on lap 54 and impacted the wall, and Kyle Busch who made contact with Cory LaJoie on lap 122 and was sent spinning up into Turn 1 sweeping up several others.
It was the most cars to finish with DNFs since the 2023 Daytona 500 which had a total of 17.
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Tyler Reddick was sixth, Brad Keselowski seventh, Martin Truex Jr. who won Stage 1, eighth. Chase Elliott and Bubba Wallace completed the top 10.
It was Blaney’s second win at Pocono. His first was also the first of his NASCAR Cup career in 2017 when he raced for the Wood Brothers.
“It was super special seven years ago to win here with the Wood Brothers and it is a special win here today,” Blaney said. “You love tracks that have special meaning to you, like your first win, and this place means so much to me.”
The Cup series heads to Indianapolis Motor Speedway next Sunday as the series forgoes the road course and returns to the famous 2.5-mile oval for the first time since 2020.
RACE RESULTS
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.
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