Ryan Blaney was in pretty good spirits on Wednesday for a midweek NASCAR media availability previewing the Cup Series championship race at Martinsville, a race he must win, just days after losing a must-win race at Homestead in which he was leading at the white flag.
Blaney wasn’t as cheerful immediately after the fact, still in the moment of letting a chance to return to the final four get away from him but there is one more opportunity where he is the defending race winner.
Most importantly, Blaney isn’t letting the pressure exceed the privilege because there are two dozen other teams that would love to have at least a must-win scenario this weekend.
“There’s pressure in everything, like in every day life” Blaney said. “There is pressure in everyone’s profession. If anyone tells you they don’t feel pressure before doing this, then they’re not telling you the whole truth because everyone feels it. This is what you love to do, there is a lot of people counting on you, that work with you and expect you to perform. It’s about ‘how do you handle it’ and ‘how do you enjoy’ the pressure and rise above it.
“You have to enjoy it because it’s a privilege to feel the pressure, right? Guys who aren’t in the playoffs anymore, they don’t feel the pressure to run well here … in the sense they don’t have championship hopes anymore. They’re not in the (Round of) 8 so the six of us still not locked in, there’s pressure there.”
Blaney instead says that pressure is his catalyst to perform, just as it was last year when he won his way into the final four, and went on to claim the championship at Phoenix.
A lot has been made about how he lost the race last weekend at Homestead, taking the lead from Denny Hamlin with two laps to go off a late restart but then losing it to Tyler Reddick on the final lap.
The narrative was basically ‘why did Blaney give Reddick the wall’ knowing that is literally his reputation at the South Florida intermediate.
He says there is just a lot happening behind the steering wheel.
“It’s so much harder than when you’re watching on TV,” Blaney said. “You’re making these decisions in the moment and you don’t have time to process or think about it, or all the options, it’s just boom-boom-boom happening really fast. It’s just a wrong decision you make sometimes. You’re never going to bat 1.000 and that’s the difficulty of sports, making the right decisions and if you can more often than you don’t.”
With that said, Blaney says he understands why fans feel that way because he does the same thing watching football.
“I’m like, why didn’t you do that or that,” Blaney said; but it’s different in the arena.
But 48 hours removed, Blaney does wish he could have it back.
“Going down the backstretch, in the moment, I’m thinking, seeing the run he has down the back and I think he’s going to pull a slider,” Blaney said.
After all, this is the guy that pulled a slider at Darlington in May on Chris Buescher.
“That is what I made my mind up on,” Blaney added, “that he was going to pull a slider. I thought he was going to enter where I did and slide up the track and I wanted to pull up under him if he did, or, I tried to cut some distance off the race track here where maybe I can still be on the outside if he pulled a slider and I could drive back around him.
“It was the wrong move and he did a good job of countering what I decided, and it stuck, but it’s so easy to say ‘you should have done this’ but it’s so hard in the moment. Guessed wrong. I had four lanes I could have chosen to block — the wall, a lane off the wall, a lane off the bottom or the bottom.
“I had a one in four decision and I just picked the wrong lane and he chose the right one.”
In other words, as Blaney put it later in the session, ‘this shit is hard, man.’
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.