Traditionally, Ryan Blaney doesn’t come on strong until the end of a season and while mid-June isn’t exactly early, it is amongst the earliest in a season that he has won, getting the job done on Sunday at Iowa Speedway.
Crew chief Jonathan Hassler made the decision to take two tires instead of four before the final restart inside 80 laps to go. Blaney managed the track position, and better disposed of lap cars than William Byron, and won by 0.716.
“What a cool way to win here,” Blaney said. “This place means a lot to me and means a lot to my mom. We had a lot of people here tonight cheering us on, so they willed us to that one. Overall, I really appreciate the whole 12 boys.
“I mean, our car was really fast all night and we got a little bit better through the night and two tires was a good call there. I didn’t know how well I was gonna hold on. I started to struggle a little bit at the end, but had enough to hang on. I’m super proud of the effort. I appreciate Advance Auto Parts, Ford, Ford Performance, Menards, Discount Tire, Wurth, Snap On, DEX Imaging, Wabash – everything they do. It makes up a little bit from a couple weeks ago.”
Blaney has lost some races under gut-punch circumstances the past few weeks, including running out of fuel on the final lap at Gateway.
The victory came after he led a career high 201 laps and Byron said he wasn’t surprised that they made the two tires work because the Penske No. 12 was the best car.
“He was the best car, especially once the 5 was out, because they were right there together,” Byron said. “I wasn’t surprised because tires didn’t matter when you have the best car.”
What happened to the 5, Kyle Larson, was that he forced a three-wide with Denny Hamlin and Daniel Suarez and it resulted in Larson and Hamlin both hard into the wall and out of contention.
“I haven’t seen a replay yet but I guess I could have been more patient and not gone three-wide up the middle, knowing who I was around,” Larson said. “I wanted to get as many cars as I could at the beginning of that run and it probably just ended up biting me.”
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“I’m not sure if Suarez got loose under me or what happened but he got into my left rear and got me out of control.”
There was a lot of attrition, especially for right front tires, throughout the race and that doesn’t even include one series of issues for Kyle Busch who with his second DNF of the season fell to 31 points out of a playoff spot.
“I don’t know what happened but something in the rear suspension broke, NextGen parts and pieces broke,” he said. “I don’t know if it was a toe link or what it was. But it changed the skew of the back end of the car, undrivable doing that.
“Came in and fixed, went back out and then the power steering belt broke. Not what we wanted for sure… having a pretty decent day, had a top-10 run going and a chance to score some points, and it wasn’t meant to be.”
Also needing a win now to make the playoffs, Josh Berry led 32 laps in the final stage but lost the lead after the final caution when Rodney Childers called him down four tires and the top lane led by Ricky Stenhouse didn’t get going.
Berry didn’t second guess anything one bit.
“Not at all,” Berry said. “I told Rodney to trust his instincts and that said four tires. The 47 struggled to get going going and hindsight, I would have chose third over sixth but the outside was winning out on nearly every restart — so sometimes things don’t go your way.”
And Childers echoed that sentiment.
“We probably needed to take the bottom on that restart,” Childers said. “If we did, we might have had a shot at it. Our car was really strong on longer runs all day. I was probably a little higher on air pressure than a lot of these guys because after the last two weeks and two DNFs, I didn’t want to take that chance again.”
Iowa Corn 350 Results
- Ryan Blaney
- William Byron
- Chase Elliott
- Christopher Bell
- Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
- Joey Logano
- Josh Berry
- Alex Bowman
- Daniel Suarez
- Brad Keselowski
- Ross Chastain
- Todd Gilliland
- Justin Haley
- Carson Hocevar
- Martin Truex Jr.
- Noah Gragson
- Bubba Wallace
- Chris Buescher
- Austin Dillon
- Harrison Burton
- Corey LaJoie
- Tyler Reddick
- Michael McDowell
- Denny Hamlin
- Ty Gibbs
- John Hunter Nemechek
- Ryan Preece
- Chase Briscoe
- Daniel Hemric
- Austin Cindric
- Zane Smith
- Erik Jones
- Kaz Grala
- Kyle Larson
- Kyle Busch
- AJ Allmendinger