Ryan Blaney is creeping dangerously close to a .500 average — and while that’s the sort of thing you hang on the fridge if you’re a baseball player, in NASCAR, .500 means one thing: disaster. The only thing you want half of in a racing season is wins. Anything else, particularly DNFs, is about as welcome as a flat tire at 200 miles an hour.
And for Blaney, that’s exactly what the number is tracking — Did Not Finish. Not good. Not good at all.
Coming into Talladega, Blaney had already failed to finish three of the first nine races. Sunday, that ugly number ticked up to four. And once again, just like his crash in Las Vegas back in March, it wasn’t even his fault. He was just minding his own business and got caught up in someone else’s mess.
At least this time it happened early — lap 44 — so Blaney didn’t have to suffer through hours of false hope. As green-flag pit stops were beginning, Brad Keselowski slowed up to dive onto pit road. Kyle Busch tapped him, Keselowski’s Ford broke loose, and chaos broke out in the middle of the pack.
“It was just a stack of guys trying to come to pit road as fast as they could and we were kind of the ham in the sandwich that got squeezed,” Keselowski said. “I waved down the backstretch to let everybody know I was gonna pit and I came off of four and everybody was so tight behind me that I didn’t even have a chance to turn left. I hate that it ruined not just our day, but several other people’s day. I don’t think I could do anything different.”
Translation: Blaney, trying to be smart and stay out of trouble, ended up getting nailed by Keselowski’s wounded Ford as it shot back up the track. Busch and Keselowski managed to crawl to pit road. Blaney wasn’t so lucky — he limped to the garage, his right-rear wheel assembly flapping around like it was held on by duct tape and prayer.
The Penske team made a brave effort to patch it together, but even they knew it was hopeless.
“We just broke too many pieces in the right-rear,” Blaney said. “That took all the damage. The right-rear wheel and it broke everything. We couldn’t fix it, unfortunately.
“I saw the 8 and 6 kind of get hooked together and they were going up the track, so I kind of picked the bottom and tried to get out of there and I think they clipped someone outside of them and the 6 came back into me and I got clipped in the right-rear.”
And just like that, the 2023 NASCAR Cup champion — yes, the man who hoisted the big trophy not that ago — now owns four DNFs in the first 10 races of 2025. Not exactly the kind of stat you want to put on a T-shirt.
“Oh gosh, man, another DNF,” Blaney said. “It just sucks. Just when we were kind of getting our momentum and didn’t even get to race today. We’ll just move on to Texas.”
It’s the racing equivalent of spending all morning building the world’s biggest Jenga tower only to have a random pigeon fly into it before lunch. And if there’s any justice in the world, Texas will bring some badly needed karma payback.
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.