May 28, 2022 | By Lee Spencer

The Cup Series could see 16 winners in 2022, maybe more, says Ryan Blaney

CONCORD, N.C.—Coming off of his first multi-win season, expectations have been high for Ryan Blaney in 2022.

The Team Penske racer is comfortably sitting second in the NASCAR Cup point standings. But with the exception of Sunday’s All-Star Race, a non-points paying event, Blaney has yet to score a “W”.

He’s not alone. There’s a small fraternity of previous winners with solid teams and competitive equipment capable of visiting Victory Lane that are still on the outside looking in. With 11 different winners in the first 13 races, Blaney believes that points alone in the regular season won’t transfer a driver into this year’s playoffs.

“I really think we will get to 16 and you hope you are part of that 16, obviously,” Blaney told RacinBoys.com. “Just for that reason, I feel like there are people who haven’t won yet that are really close to winning and have cars and teams that can win any given week.

“You saw it at Kansas. Kurt (Busch) has been good all year but they haven’t shown that speed all year. He was brutally fast at Kansas. That is one of those things were you have a guy that is 20-something in points and they hit it right and go win the race and that is someone below me in points that jumped me now. That can happen any week that a team finds something where maybe they didn’t show that amount of speed all year but they go and win the race.”

Kurt Busch was 21st in the Cup standings when he finally broke through for the win at Kansas—a track that had challenged the 44-year-old driver in the past. With a new team and a new car, the win was a relief for the No. 45 23XI Racing crew who had shown speed early on but endured a rash of misfortune during five of the previous six races.

Denny Hamlin and the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing team hit on something at Richmond. In 13 starts, Hamlin has just two top-five finishes—including the win. He’s 20th in the standings and has yet to exhibit his traditional consistency. But halfway through the regular season, Hamlin is in a position to advance as one of the current 11 winners.

Technically, only William Byron and Ross Chastain, who each have two wins in 2022, are securely locked into the post-season. Blaney is second in the standings, the only Team Penske driver yet to win this season.

While the No. 12 team has shown speed, the Fords have not nearly been as fast as the Chevrolets—in particular Team Hendrick, the only organization with four 2022 winners on the roster. At Kansas, Toyota seemed to have found something for its intermediate program with five  Camrys finishing in the top six led by the elder Busch. Blaney’s teammate Austin Cindric, the top Ford, was 11th.

“The last month or so we have been okay,” Blaney said. “In some of the circumstances, I feel like we didn’t finish as good as I thought we could have. We went to Kansas and I thought we could have ran fifth, probably at best. But we got put in a bad spot on the last restart and ended up outside the top-10 and then I hit the wall.

“Dover was kind of the same thing. We were running pretty good up towards the front and we had some pit road issues and had to go to the back. That is something that some of it is circumstantial but you want your cars to be a little faster because it makes everything a lot easier when your car is faster.”

The new car, at least early on, has accomplished what NASCAR set out to do—attract new teams and even the playing field. Chastain and Kurt Busch won with new or expanded teams this year. Chastain, Cindric and Chase Briscoe are first-time winners.

Count former Cup champions Martin Truex Jr., Kevin Harvick and Brad Keselowski—each with 30-plus wins and Harvick with nearly double that—among the winless. Tyler Reddick and Daniel Suarez appear close to scoring breakthrough victories. Christopher Bell, Aric Almirola, Austin Dillon, Erik Jones and Bubba Wallace have shown flashes of speed and have won in the past.

But after his first All-Star win, Blaney remains optimistic.

“We kind of tried a little something new with our cars at Texas,” Blaney said. We have been lacking a little bit of speed. That is something we have been really working hard on trying to find and we came to Texas with a little different idea of how to do things. It seemed to work. I think all our cars were pretty fast. You hope it carries over to other races and tracks and for the 600 this weekend.”

Still, he’ll be battling other drivers such as Harvick, Truex and Keselowski—each with multiple wins at Charlotte Motor Speedway—looking to add their names to list of 2022 victors before the playoffs kick off at Darlington Raceway in September.

“I feel like you are going to have to be a winner in the regular season,” Blaney said. “I could see us getting to 16 and maybe even more than that.”