Folks, the 2025 season hasn’t been going great for Team Penske. Especially for the #12 team. All the last three races for them have ended in DNFs! It started with 24 laps to go in Phoenix. Ryan Blaney was running P8, and suddenly, his engine blew up. Next up was Las Vegas, and Blaney was not having a good day. He started from the rear of the field, was quick to climb into the top 20. But again had some trouble with his car and had to pit. Again, start at the back of the field and climb up to P7 only to get spun around by Ricky Stenhouse Jr. And then Homestead Miami one was the most disappointing.
Well, not for Bubba Wallace; he was amused. And for folks who don’t know, Wallace and Blaney are best friends. They often hang out off-track and yank each other’s chain. In fact, Wallace’s wife Amanda Wallace and Blaney’s wife Gianna Tulio are good friends too! So when Wallace got to know about the blowup, he could not help but take a playful yet concerned jibe at #12.
Bubba Wallace’s priceless leg-pulling
Here’s how things went down for Blaney and his team in Homestead, Miami. Blaney started in the top 5 and was quick to take the lead in the race. It was feeling like Team Penske would finally get their first win of the season. And then Blaney even went on to win stage one and then even took P3 in stage 2. And then came the dreadful moment. That, too, after Blaney in the race led 124 out of the 267 laps. Picture this: Wallace was leading the race with Kyle Larson on his tail. And Blaney was charging quickly from P3 to take back that lead as he hunted down Larson.
What’s interesting is the timing of this whole thing. When Blaney was making a move on the #5, his spotter, Tim Fedewa, said on the radio, “Been the fastest car the last two laps. Keep taking care of your stuff; nothing coming.” That’s exactly when the #12 car’s engine blew out! And Blaney’s response to the spotter was, “I’m fu—– blowing up or something. You have got to be fu—– kidding me.”
At this moment, the #23 team is still leading while being cautious of the #12, as Blaney was quickly covering a lot of ground. But then Bubba Wallace gets an update from his spotter Fredie Kraft on the radio: “Ryan blew up.” To which Bubba responds both shockingly and amusingly, “Oof, another one? That will be a fun plane ride back.” Well, we don’t exactly know how much Wallace troubled Blaney over this, but the #12 driver was disappointed after the race.
He said, “I didn’t have any warning. It just laid over when I got back to wide-open down the front, and that was all she wrote. It just stinks. We had a really fast Dent Wizard Ford Mustang. We led a lot of laps. We lost a little bit of track position there with some stuff on pit road, but (we) got back to third, and it was a great race between me and Bubba and Larson. I’m sure Denny was gonna get back into it. It was gonna be a heck of a battle the last 60 laps or so, but it just didn’t really work out for us.” But the #12 camp isn’t disheartened, as the next race is their stronghold.
Can Ryan Blaney win at Martinsville?
Look at the #12’s campaign so far. He got a P7 at the Daytona 500, followed by a P4 at Atlanta. But that’s not surprising. Penske cars have always been dominant on drafting tracks. Things started to go down for him in COTA, where he finished P19. Then came the streak of DNFs. But still, there’s a long way to go in the season, and Blaney’s staying optimistic. He said, “We’ll continue to keep fighting. I appreciate the 12 guys for just giving me a hot rod. It was an incredibly, incredibly fast race car today. We’ll keep our heads up. It’s just one of those things where it’s not really going our way right now, but the good news is we’re bringing fast cars, and that’s all you can ask for. We’ll keep on moving.”
Next up is Martinsville, and no driver has better stats than Ryan Blaney there. Blaney has won twice there and has an average finish of 8.3. The only driver close to him is Jimmie Johnson, with a 9.9 average finish. And in the next-gen era, Blaney’s average finish on Martinsville is 3.5, which is impressive. On top of which, he’ll be entering the next race as the defending winner! Remember the 2024 fall race? Rather, he won the fall race in 2023. So clearly, the #12 is a top runner to win the iconic grandfather’s clock of Martinsville.
But for that, the #12 team needs to make that engine rock solid. And Travis Geisler, Team Penske’s vice president of competition, is positive about it. He recently said, “From there, you’ve just got to lean on Roush Yates (Engines) and Ford to fix the problem. We have a lot of problems that we need to fix from this weekend, and we’ve got to outsource that one and let somebody else handle it and have the trust that, over the years, they’ve given us incredibly reliable engines and really have delivered for us. And they’ve just got to go the drawing board a little bit here and figure out what’s going on. I think it looks like a couple different modes of failure here, I would say. So maybe there’s not necessarily a clear direction, but that’s up to them.”
What do you think? Can Ryan Blaney win Martinsville and get his third grandfather’s clock? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.
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