Ryan Blaney’s championship hopes didn’t so much hit the wall Sunday at World Wide Technology Raceway as they were introduced to it at considerable speed.
The 2023 NASCAR Cup Series champion was having exactly the kind of afternoon he needed in the second race of The Chase. Blaney’s No. 12 Team Penske Ford was running near the front, collecting stage points and slowly clawing his way up the championship standings.
Then the brakes decided they had participated enough.
On Lap 154 of 240, a brake rotor failed and sent Blaney’s Ford hard into the outside wall. There was no contact with another car, no dramatic battle gone wrong and no particularly clever way to avoid it. The brakes simply ceased to be a thing.
“I have no brakes,” Blaney told his team over the radio. “So, tell everyone to look out here.”
That is generally not the sort of sentence a race team wants to hear from its driver, particularly when there are still 86 laps remaining and a championship is at stake.
Blaney eventually got the battered Ford to the garage, ending his afternoon with a 35th-place finish — second to last among the remaining cars. More importantly, the points damage was enormous.
He arrived at Gateway 16 points behind Chase leader Denny Hamlin. At the time of the failure, Blaney had worked his way to within eight points of the lead.
He leaves with a crater where his championship position used to be.
And the frustrating part for Blaney is that he apparently never saw the disaster coming.
“I had a little concern early in the race, but then they kind of stabilized,” Blaney said. “They didn’t really get worse.”
Then, apparently, they decided to get dramatically worse.
Blaney said the brakes appeared to fail before he even touched the pedal on the frontstretch.
“They just crumbled apart and blew out,” he said.
There was at least one small mercy. The failure happened in a place where Blaney could keep the car relatively straight rather than discovering the problem halfway through a corner.
“Honestly, it’s unfortunate, but fairly fortunate where they blew and didn’t blow as I was kind of in the corner,” he said.
That is NASCAR’s version of good news: The brakes exploded, but at least they picked a nice spot to do it.
The incident was particularly troublesome because Blaney had already shown enough speed to make the afternoon matter. He said the team had improved the car as the race progressed and was looking forward to finding out how it stacked up against the other championship contenders during the final run.
“I thought we did a great job today and running up towards the front and doing really good in the stages,” Blaney said. “I was looking forward to seeing how that last run played out.”
He never got to see it.
And neither did Zane Smith, who suffered a similar brake rotor failure earlier in the race and slammed his No. 38 Ford into the wall.
For Blaney, though, the wreck was more than another damaged race car. In a championship format where every position suddenly seems to be worth the GDP of a small nation, a 35th-place finish is the sort of thing that can haunt a driver for the next eight races.
Blaney’s response afterward was refreshingly simple.
“Let’s go race next week,” he said.
Because when the brakes quit working, there really isn’t much else to do except perhaps hope the breaks, and brakes, go his way starting next week at Bristol.
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour 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, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.
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