I’ve been saying it all season, if Ryan Blaney can get to the Championship 4, then you better watch out. Which is why his path to this point has been similar in nature to Joey Logano’s a season ago. Just get by. Don’t take too many risks to put you further behind than you should be. Maximize when you need to.

Isn’t that was Blaney is doing, or has been doing up until this point?

I get why Kyle Petty was among those that called Blaney out this spring saying he hasn’t lived up to expectations. But, here he is and here he now also has a massive opportunity to change the narrative.

On paper, there’s no reason he’s still alive for the championship next week. 2 top 5 finishes in the last 20 races. Both of which being wins. Since June, his best finish was 9th.

But, remarkably, here he still is with being 1 of 8 drivers left next week with a shot at a championship.

“It’s weird. I feel like it’s been up and down,” Blaney admitted on his season. “I feel like we were really solid until winning in Charlotte and then I would say up until Sonoma, and then we kind of lost our way a little bit after the break and just struggled to kind of find speed and put together races and making mistakes, whether it’s my mistakes or pit road.

“I feel like we’ve done a good job as the playoffs have started kind of managing these races like we need to and getting back on track.

“Yeah, it’s kind of weird. I feel like we had a lot more top-5s last year and contended for more wins probably, but didn’t execute very good. I feel like this year we’ve executed pretty good, especially to the two-thirds point of this year. That’s something to be super proud of.

“It’s definitely shown that we’ve done a good job of believing in each other and just doing our job. So those guys are awesome at that.”

The second most stage points in Texas left him in striking distance of the cutline heading to Talladega. Blaney knew the last week that Ford’s would be at a deficit in Texas so why not score as many points as he could.

On the flipside, he knew that he’d have a car capable of winning at Talladega this week though too. This was a race that he had to be calculated just to get to the end and when he was there at the finish, take what you can get. He led the final two laps en route to not just a victory, but an automatic advancement into the Round of 8.

“I think a shot in the arm like this, it’s like, let’s go,” said Blaney. “We’re in the Round of 8. We’re still in this thing. We have one in it. Let’s keep working.”

What can he do in the third round.

“I obviously feel good about them,” Blaney said of the tracks in the round. “We’ve been working super hard to find this intermediate speed. I feel like we’ve gotten better. We ran better at Kansas than we did prior. We had a good run going at Texas. Didn’t qualify good, but got through there and was able to maintain.

“I don’t know, it’s kind of hard to tell until you unload. You are always trying to work on stuff, but you have to have confidence that you are going to unload fast and with speed and be able to compete.”

With 2 of the 3 tracks being intermediate tracks and Ford’s struggles on them this season, it’s not like they’re bad tracks for Blaney though. Still, with his playoff points where they are, it may take a win for Blaney to get to the final round.

Which is why this is his time to shine and prove it. This is only the second time in his career that Blaney’s won multiple races in a season. The other was in 2021 when he won back-to-back races? If Blaney is going to get to Phoenix next month with his championship aspirations still intact, it’s going to likely take a third win. If he’s going to win the title, it will take a fourth.

Logano had 2 regular season wins last year and it took him winning for the 4th time of the season at Phoenix to win the title.

Is Blaney ready for that?

Blaney has now made the Round of 8 five times. All in the last 7 years. He said the key this year in advancing to his first Championship 4 is about learning from the mistakes of the previous 4.

“Yeah, I think just learning from mistakes,” he said. “I feel like I’ve made mistakes. Last year I made two massive mistakes and kept us out of Phoenix. So I think learning from prior experiences is beneficial there. Obviously you need your cars to be fast enough because it gets super tough, and these racetracks are — there’s no superspeedway or no road course. It’s traditional tracks. Then it gets super hard. When everything resets, you have guys that have tons of points. Today helped us out a little bit, but a couple guys have way more playoff points than us. That makes it super tough.

“If we can learn from past mistakes and have our cars fast and just not mess up, really. I mean, you have to perform. I can’t believe you took the execution word away from me, but no, I think just believing in each other and continuing to work. I feel like our cars haven’t been quite the speed they needed to be to compete with maybe the 5, or the 11 has been fast, but I think we’re still working. This could be a big shot in the arm for us.

“I’m excited to see what we have for them when we unload in Vegas.”

For Vegas, he has eight Top-7 finishes in his last 13 starts. His last two though were 28th and 13th. At Kansas this year, he finished 16th and 12th too.

For Homestead, Blaney finished third in 2021 and has been good at the 1.5-mile track overall in both the Xfinity and Truck Series races too. If not for a mistake last year, he had another Top-5 going. He was fourth in Stage 2. He finished ninth in both Darlington races, a track like Homestead.

His best chance may be a win at Martinsville.

Blaney was fourth and seventh in the last two spring races, third in last year’s Fall race while also coming home runner-up in both races in 2020. He was fourth and fifth respectively in 2019. Blaney, has seven Top-5s in his last 11 tries on the Virginia paperclip overall. While he was 11th in both races in 2021, he did sweep both stages in the spring race.

Then it’s to Phoenix. Blaney was runner-up in last year’s race and had a car capable of passing teammate Joey Logano for the win, but in true team player fashion, Blaney elected to play interference if need be to let Logano win the race and the championship.

Will roles be reversed next month?

He was runner-up this past spring.

“Yeah, I mean, I definitely think it’s probably not been the year we wanted at our group, right?” Blaney admitted. “You go from winning the championship with the 22 guys, and then we’ve struggled a little bit this year overall for speed and finishes and stuff like that.

“Joey getting knocked out in the first round was definitely a gut punch. Yeah, it’s easy to get down on that stuff, but it’s easy to get fired up about things too.

“Our group is always working towards getting better. I don’t think they — they don’t dwell on being behind a little bit for a long time. They just go to work, right, and they try to figure out how to be better.

“That’s their mindset no matter if we would have won today or not. You’re always trying to get — our people are always into it. Maybe they’re frustrated at times that you are not running good, but they’re always — they don’t give up. They always just try to be better and just work to solve the problem.

“I mean, you’re going to have downtimes in racing. You’re going to kind of be up top and then struggle for speed, and then it’s just a big circle of life really when it comes to that stuff. I think this is definitely a good motivator, that’s for sure, to fire everybody up.”