Stat Sheet: Blowing an Engine with the Dominant Car

Engine failures are rare in the current era of NASCAR. Even rarer than an engine failure is one that happens to a car that was waxing the field.

We’ll never know if Ryan Blaney would’ve won Sunday (March 23) at Homestead-Miami Speedway, but the odds were looking pretty good. He absolutely dominated the first stage, pulling a 10-second lead before the first caution, and he led 124 of the first 161 laps. He rebounded from a poor pit stop at the end of stage two that cost him six spots, and he was running right behind the leaders in third when the engine let go in spectacular fashion on lap 207.

Ryan Blaney's engine just exploded. That's the second engine failure of the year for the No. 12 team. #NASCARonFS1 pic.twitter.com/UyRwsOXkw7

— FOX: NASCAR (@NASCARONFOX) March 23, 2025

The No. 12 team has been dealing with mechanical gremlins to start 2025, and Homestead was the worst possible time for them to strike again.

It’s been quite a while since such a dramatic failure occurred, but it’s not unheard of. You’d ultimately have to go back more than two years to find the last NASCAR Cup Series race where a car that led the most laps suffered an engine failure.

That race was the 2022 Southern 500, when Kyle Busch led a race-high 155 laps, only to blow an engine while leading under caution to the delight of the crowd.

There have been 12 Cup races since 2000 when the car that led the most laps detonated an engine: five in the Gen 4 car, two in the Car of Tomorrow, three in the Gen 6 car and two in the Next Gen car.

Of the 12 drivers, half were leading when their problems began. Others, like Blaney and Matt Kenseth at Dover Motor Speedway in 2007, were running top three.

It’s worth noting that the majority of these failures occurred on high-speed, high-horsepower tracks where engines and equipment are pushed to their absolute limits.

Four occurred on two-mile tracks, all with the Gen 4 car. Two of the three Gen 6 failures occurred at superspeedways, while the other was at a road course. The two CoT failures were on one-mile tracks, while Blaney was the first dominant car to blow an engine on a 1.5-mile track since 2000.

With 12 such races in just over 24 seasons, a dominant car fails to mechanically reach the finish once every two years in the 21st century. But that number is even lower in recent times, as Blaney and Busch are the only two to have met this fate in the last eight seasons.

One would think that this number would continue to drop, especially as teams continue to perfect their craft and engines become more and more reliable over time. But a dominant car blew up in the year 2025, and the endurance battle between man and machine, while infrequent, won’t be over anytime soon.