Sometimes, math is hard, even for world class motorsports engineers.
That’s effectively what happened to Ryan Blaney last weekend at Gateway, running out of fuel one lap short of the checkered flag, handing the win to teammate Austin Cindric instead.
Blaney chalks it up to being no different than a pit stop issue or one of his own occasional missteps behind the wheel.
It happens.
“Everyone makes mistakes, everyone makes errors,” said the defending champion after qualifying on Saturday at Sonoma. “I make them every single weekend. We all expect perfection out of the whole team but we also all make mistakes.”
So, what exactly happened?
“Ultimately, what it was, we thought there was more in the tank than what there actually was,” Blaney said. “We dumped enough fuel in it the last stop, judging off what we thought was in it prior to that. Just a little math mistake there.
“We learn from those things and move on. It’s the same as when you see a simple pit stop get messed up or you see me make a mistake. Gosh, it could happen to anyone. We did our best to understand what happened and we take measures to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Blaney, who has a short fuse in real time, says he got it out of his system immediately when it happened and hasn’t put any thought into it beyond learning from it.
“I try to be a short-term memory person about that kind of stuff,” Blaney said. “You’re bummed about it so it’s like ‘what happened?’ ‘This happened.’
“We learned a lot more about what happened on Monday when our engineer, Tony (Palmer) dug into it and it was like ‘okay, we’ll try to do better’ is how we looked at it.
“I try to move on pretty quickly. It does no good to commensurate over it. I took the good things out of it — that we all ran very well, all three (Team Penske) cars were up front … and it was something to learn from. Learn from it and hope we continue to show the speed we’ve gained the past few weeks.”
Despite the uptick in performance, Blaney has fallen from sixth in the standings to 12th. He’s also just 47 points above the playoff cutline so the past month has really hurt.
As a result, he’s starting to count points a little bit.
“Yeah, a little bit, especially now having three pretty rough points finishes in a row from wrecking at Darlington, wrecking at Charlotte, and got good stage points last week, but finished terrible,” Blaney said. “We should be plus 100 to the good rather than where we are at.
“So in our spot, we need to be mindful of it because we can’t give up gobs of points moving forward.”