Ryan Blaney has been on an absolute tear, and his dominant win in Sunday’s (Sept. 21) NASCAR Cup Series race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway is just the cherry on top.
In the last 10 Cup races, starting at Dover Motor Speedway on July 21, Blaney ranks first among all drivers with two wins, six top fives, nine top 10s, an average finish of 5.6 and an average of 43.1 points scored for race.
That dominance is even more pronounced when comparing his last 10 races to the heavy hitters of the 2025 Cup season. Following the 20th race of the season at Sonoma Raceway, Blaney ranked seventh in points and was 123 points behind leader (and eventual regular season champion) William Byron.
Blaney has outscored by Byron by 103 points in the 10 races since, and he’s made up more than a full race’s worth of points on the entire field. The drivers in the following chart ranked top 10 in regular season points after the conclusion of Sonoma, and Blaney has outrun all of them by a comically absurd margin.
The thrilling come-from-behind victory at Daytona International Speedway. The dominant aforementioned win at New Hampshire. The consistent top-five finishes and near-wins at tracks like Iowa Speedway, Bristol Motor Speedway and Richmond Raceway. Blaney has done it all in the last three months, and he’s now just 19 points behind Byron for the most points scored across the entire season.
It’s easy for one to think that Blaney is just getting hot at the right time — which he is, no doubt — but in reality, he’s shown this speed all season. It’s just been harder for everyone to see it because he had not one, not two, but seven DNFs in the first 20 races.
Seven. In the first 20 races, Blaney took 35% of the checkered flags from his motorhome.
And of those seven DNFs, none of them were of his own making. He blew an engine with a top-five car at Phoenix Raceway in March. He got wrecked from sixth during a restart crash at Las Vegas Motor Speedway the following, and he led 124 of the first 161 laps at Homestead-Miami Speedway, only to lose another engine in the final stage and cap off an agonizing early-season stretch of back-to-back-to-back DNFs.
Blaney’s a former winner at Charlotte Motor Speedway, Talladega Superspeedway and EchoPark Speedway, and he got collected in multi-car crashes in all three races during the spring and early summer. Then came Sonoma in July, where he was running fourth until he got run off course by Chris Buescher in the final stage. He finally got back on the lead lap at the very end of the race, only to be finished off by Kyle Larson for another DNF with four laps to go.
With absolutely rotten luck in multiple races he was running well at, it’s easy to see why Blaney was seventh in points and a “tier behind” the Hendrick Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racing drivers toward the midpoint of the 2025 season. Now that luck is finally on his side, Blaney is showing that he’s been one of the best, if not the best, driver all along.
Oh, and let’s not forget how monumental of a statement New Hampshire was for Blaney and Team Penske as a whole. It’s no secret that they’ve been elite at short, flat tracks on the Cup calendar, but Blaney, Penske teammate Joey Logano and quasi-teammate Josh Berry combined to absolutely dominate, leading 273 of the 301 laps on Sunday.
If we’re looking at measuring sticks for the Championship Weekend at Phoenix Raceway in six weeks’ time, New Hampshire is one of the best tests for the conditions of the flat, low-banked, one-mile oval of Phoenix. And with how much Penske and Blaney have excelled at Phoenix in the past, the 2025 title might as well be Blaney’s to lose if he makes it to the Championship 4.
And if the 2025 season does indeed end with Blaney’s second Cup championship and Penske’s fourth in a row, it won’t just be because the team knows Phoenix inside and out. It’ll be because Blaney has been one of the best drivers week-in and week-out, all season long.
Stephen Stumpf is the NASCAR Content Director for Frontstretch and is a three-year veteran of the site. His weekly column is “Stat Sheet,” and he formerly wrote "4 Burning Questions" for three years. He also writes commentaries, contributes to podcasts, edits articles and is frequently at the track for on-site coverage.
Find Stephen on Twitter @stephen_stumpf