Back-to-back Cup champ? Ryan Blaney attempts to be the first in 14 years

After Ryan Blaney won the NASCAR Cup Series title last year, his father had the idea to build a trophy case as a gift to his son.

His dad, a well-accomplished racer in his own right, still has the trophy so he can build the case, but …

“He hasn’t even started,” Blaney said. “And his excuse is, ‘I need to know if I build one or two?’

“Well, that’s a pretty good excuse.”

Dave Blaney might as well wait a few more days before getting started.

Ryan Blaney will try to become the first Cup driver to win back-to-back titles in the elimination playoff era (which started in 2014) as he battles Tyler Reddick, Joey Logano and William Byron for the 2024 Cup championship Sunday at Phoenix Raceway. The driver among those four who finishes the best in the 40-car field will end up as the champion.

“It’s something really hard to do any sport, to go back to back,” Blaney said.

“You have to perform two years in a row — you and your team have to do it and have perfect ends of the year. It’s really tough. We have a pretty unique opportunity to try to change that [stat], and hopefully we bring our best stuff and have a shot at it.”

The Team Penske driver believes he has had a better season than last year, but this year he has had seven races where he has failed to finish so his stats don’t show just how much speed his cars have had throughout the year.

“We’ve had an overall way better year than what we did last year, and maybe it hasn’t shown because I’ve gotten in a ton of wrecks this year,” Blaney said. “It’s no one’s doing. I feel like us as a group, we’re way stronger than where we were in 2023. … I look at last year, we kind of caught fire at a good time, right before the playoffs.

“This year, I feel like we’ve been fantastic all year and have still gotten better through the year.”

In that championship run a year ago, Blaney won at Martinsville, a week prior to Phoenix, giving him a boost of momentum into the championship race, where he placed second overall and first among the four finalists.

Blaney, who had never advanced to the Champ 4 until last year, once again goes into Phoenix having won at Martinsville — in even a little more dramatic fashion as this time he had to win to Martinsville for any chance to advance.

So just getting to the Champ 4 in back-to-back years is an accomplishment (only Blaney and Byron made the Champ 4 last year among the 2024 finalists).

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Now that he’s there, Blaney should feel as if he has a good shot. He has finished In the top 5 in six consecutive Phoenix races — and in the last eight Phoenix races, he has an average running position of 5.6.

“To do it back-to-back, to pretty much have the same group of guys that I had last year on the car — it just shows the strength of everybody working together and being a family together,” Blaney said about potentially accomplishing a feat that hasn’t been done since Jimmie Johnson won five consecutive titles from 2006-2010.

“This is such a strong group. We’ve done this two years in a row. It’s a huge feat, so it would definitely be a little bit more special.”

Logano, a teammate to Blaney at Team Penske, won titles in 2018 and 2022 and didn’t even make it to the Champ 4 round the following year. He knows just how difficult it is to repeat.

“The competitors are closer than ever,” Logano said. “There’s no clear advantage in the race teams anymore like there used to be, or not as much — when you think of the old car, you’d have maybe 12 cars that can win every weekend.

“Now you have 25 cars that can win any weekend. Maybe more. So that just puts more cars within the range of being able to win, making it harder to win. You don’t have the guys that are winning eight, nine, 10 races in a year anymore.”

Blaney has won three races this year. He probably feels it should have been at least four if not more as he lost some close finishes and then couldn’t hold off a hard-charging Reddick in the top lane at Homestead the week prior to Martinsville.

Having a championship already helped Blaney handle the disappointment of Homestead as far as having the confidence to bounce back and perform at a top level in a must-win situation.

“I had no one to be disappointed in other than myself,” Blaney said. “That was purely, 100 percent on me that I lost Miami making the wrong decision on the last lap of the race.”

Blaney hopes he has the wrong decisions out of his system and that he can make all the right ones Sunday.

If so, his dad will know that he can start building a bigger trophy case. Unless he feels should wait another year.

“That’d be over the line,” Blaney said with a laugh when asked about the trophy case. “Get the two done right now [if we win] and worry about the other one.”

Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.

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