Back-to-back Cup champions? Ryan Blaney is trying to become the first in 14 years

After Ryan Blaney won the NASCAR Cup Series title last year, his father had the idea of ​​building a trophy case as a gift for his son.

His father, a successful runner himself, still has the trophy to build his case, but …

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

“Well, that’s a good excuse.”

Dave Blaney may wait a few more days before starting.

Ryan Blaney will try to become the first Cup driver to win back-to-back titles in a streak (which began in 2014) as he battles Tyler Reddick, Joey Logano and William Byron in Sunday’s 2024 Cup race at Phoenix Raceway. The driver among the four who finished best in the field of 40 cars will be the champion.

“It’s a really hard thing to do in any game, to come back,” Blaney said.

“You have to do it two years in a row – you and your team have to do it and finish the year well. It’s really difficult. We have a unique opportunity to try to change that. [stat]and hopefully we’ll bring our best stuff and give it a shot.”

The Team Penske driver believes he had a better season than last year, but this year he failed to finish seven races so his statistics do not show how fast his cars were throughout the year.

“We’ve had a much better year than we did last year, and it probably hasn’t shown up yet because I’ve had a lot of disasters this year,” Blaney said. “No one does. I feel like us as a team, we’re a lot stronger than where we were in 2023. … I look at last year, we caught fire at a good time, right before the playoffs.

“This year, I feel like we’ve been good all year and we’re getting better all year.”

In that race last year, Blaney won in Martinsville, a week before Phoenix, which gave him a boost in the championship race, where he placed second overall and first among the finalists.

Blaney, who had never advanced to the Champ 4 until last year, entered Phoenix again with a win at Martinsville – even more impressive since this time he had to win at Martinsville to have a chance to advance.

So just getting to Champ 4 in consecutive years is an achievement (only Blaney and Byron won Champ 4 last year among the 2024 finalists).

Now that he’s there, Blaney should feel like he has a good shot. He has finished in the top 5 in six straight Phoenix races – and in the last eight Phoenix races, he has a 5.6 career average.

“To make it back to back, to have the same group of guys that I had last year in the car – it shows the strength of everyone working together and being a family together,” Blaney said of achieving the feat. which has not been done since Jimmie Johnson won five consecutive titles from 2006-2010.

“This is a strong team. We’ve done this two years in a row. It’s a big job, so it can be a little bit special.”

Logano, Blaney’s teammate at Team Penske, won titles in 2018 and 2022 and didn’t even qualify for Champ 4 the following year. You know how hard it is to repeat.

“The competition is closer than ever,” Logano said. “There’s not as much of a clear advantage to the racing teams as it used to be, or not as much – if you think about an old car, you can have 12 cars that can win every weekend.

“Now you’ve got 25 cars that can win any given weekend. Maybe more. So that puts a lot of cars within range of being able to win, which makes it harder to win. You don’t have guys winning eight, nine, 10 races 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 on close penalties and couldn’t hold off a hard-charging Reddick in the top lane at Homestead the week before Martinsville.

Having a championship already helped Blaney deal with the Homestead upset with the confidence to bounce back and perform at a high level in a must-win situation.

“No one would be disappointed but me,” said Blaney. “That was 100 percent for me that I lost Miami and I made the wrong decision in the last lap of the race.”

Blaney hopes he has some bad decisions in his schedule and that he can make all the right ones on Sunday.

If so, his father will know that he can start building a big trophy case. Unless he sees he has to wait another one a year.

“That would be over the line,” Blaney said with a laugh when asked about the trophy case. “Do both now [if we win] and worry about the other.”

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

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