Ryan Blaney, crew chief Jonathan Hassler, spotter Josh Williams and the Team Penske No. 12 team have won the NASCAR Cup Series championship.
Meanwhile, Ross Chastain won the race at Phoenix Raceway, becoming the first driver in the decade since the final four elimination playoff format was instituted to win the race as a non-championship finalist.
Blaney needed to overcome a bit of adversity in the closing stages, having lost the championship lead on the final round of pit stop during a caution for a Kyle Busch spin with 37 laps to go. Blaney felt held up by Chastain during the previous run but it never really cost him time to Kyle Larson or William Byron behind him.
However, the Hendrick Motorsports No. 5 team got Larson off pit road ahead of Blaney ahead of the final restart. Blaney responded to the moment by passing Larson for the championship lead with 20 laps to go.
“Just time to go to work,” Ryan Blaney said of his message to himself before the final restart. “I mean, did a good job of getting to where we needed to be. Those guys had two good pit stops. Just need to go to work. Hoping our car was good enough, which it was.”
Larson kept him close for several laps afterwards but Blaney drove away in the final laps and even started working to surpass Chastain in the closing laps.
This is the second season in which a Team Penske driver won the Cup Series championship following Joey Logano taking his second in 2022. He joins Logano and Brad Keselowski as the third driver to win a Cup Series championship for team owner Roger Penske.
Ford Performance earned a clean sweep of all three NASCAR championships with Ben Rhodes and Cole Custer winning the Truck Series and Xfinity Series titles respectively.
This season marked the fourth time Blaney had reached at least the Round of 8 but had been denied a championship race berth in each occasion. His team struggled for speed for much of the summer months but found it when it mattered the most.
Related: Brake failure ends Christopher Bell NASCAR championship bid
Ryan Blaney earns first NASCAR Cup championship
Of the final four drivers, Blaney had the fewest top-5s and laps led and tied with Larson for the fewest top-10s.
Blaney won playoff races at Talladega and Martinsville to advance into the Round of 8 and final four respectively. He closed out his championship season with an average finish of 2.7 across the final four races en route to clinching.
“You never want to count yourself out,” Blaney said. “I mean, I think in the summer we were struggling a little bit. But we never gave up. We just went to work. I’ve said that all week, like, this group goes to work and they figure out problems. That’s why they’re such an amazing group to be with, with the Team Penske folks, ’cause they just put their head down and do the work, accept the challenge.
“That’s what we did. It’s not happenstance we started running good through the Playoffs. It was a lot of hard work by a lot of amazing men and women at the shop. I can’t thank them enough for that. They deserve this as much as the people who travel here.”
With the speed Blaney had, Larson likely needed to get clean air on the restart, but couldn’t clear Chastain.
“Yeah, his car was really fast,” Larson said of Blaney. “Really the last few months. Yeah, especially here today. Our pit crew and pit road really kept us in the game. We weren’t the greatest on the track, but I was just hoping for pit stops ’cause I knew the way our team executed our lights, the way our pit crew can execute a fast pit stop, I knew that was going to be our only shot really to win.
“The (pit crew) did everything in their power to give us the winning job done there. Huge thank you to them. I needed to come out the leader on that restart. Ross got a really good start from the second row. Was hoping I could get clear of Denny and get the lead, have Ross kind of protect for me behind me.”
Byron dominated the final four in the first half but a cooler track that took rubber proved to be his undoing.
“Once the track rubbered in, we got really tight,” Byron said. “Especially when we lost the lead on track, we just had a big balance shift and got tight back in second through fifth, just couldn’t gain a lot of speed through one and two, just kind of having to really over-slow the car, get it to the bottom.
“That’s all we had there.”
Blaney won his first championship while Byron and Christopher Bell, who was eliminated early with a brake rotor failure, are still looking for their first. Larson was seeking his second following a triumph in 2021.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.