Ryan Blaney Will Have to Dig Out of a Playoff Hole after Darlington Penalty
A dreadful Southern 500 on Sunday night marred by a pre-race inspection penalty will put Ryan Blaney up against challenging odds over the next two races at Richmond Raceway and Bristol Motor Speedway to close out the first round of the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs.
Blaney was considered a dark horse to make the championship race entering the Round of 16. He has only captured one win this season, but his underlying statistics are equivalent to many of the expected contenders, and there were at least four other races the Penske No. 12 should have won during the regular season.
But everything began to unravel on Sunday when he was penalized 10 points and sent to the rear of the field when a five-pound bag of lead was discovered in the car -- a ballast violation.
Team Penske offered the following explanation in a statement prior to the race:
"Team Penske’s No. 12 Ford Mustang was penalized for improperly mounted ballast during inspection this afternoon prior to the NASCAR Cup Series race at Darlington. A five-pound bag of lead that is typically used during setup at the shop to simulate fluid weights prior to the race engine being installed was accidentally left in the car."
Making matters worse, Darlington was already one of Blaney’s worst racetracks, as the second-generation NASCAR driver had only posted a 19.9 average finish with no top-10s entering the weekend.
He fared no better on Sunday from the rear, making his way inside the top-15 by the midway point, when he was forced to come back down pit road with a flat tire.
He received damage on a restart at the beginning of the third stage and struggled his way to a 24th place finish -- falling from nine points above the playoff elimination cutline to 17 below it.
1. Kevin Harvick (1 win)
2. Denny Hamlin +54
3. Joey Logano +27
4. Brad Keselowski +22
5. Alex Bowman +19
6. Martin Truex Jr. +16
7. Chase Elliott +12
8. Austin Dillon +10
9. William Byron +9
10. Kyle Busch +7
11. Kurt Busch +4
12. Aric Almirola +0
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13. Clint Bowyer -0
14. Cole Custer -3
15. Matt DiBenedetto -17
16. Ryan Blaney -17
The bottom four winless drivers in championship points after next weekend’s Bristol Night Race will be eliminated from the championship with all remaining drivers having their points reset for the next three-race round.
Travis Geisler is Penske’s competition director and served as Blaney’s crew chief upon the one-race suspension of Todd Gordon for the ballast violation.
During a media conference call on Tuesday, Geisler said the playoffs are a 'zero mistake game,' and they made the worst possible one before the first race of the elimination showdown. Despite some industry chatter on Sunday over how the infraction might have been intentional to lighten the car during the race, Geisler was adamant that it was simply a mistake.
Geisler explained that cars are built without engines and that ballast is used to simulate engine weight, both with and without fluids. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, Penske is working with fewer people in the shop at a single time, and the bag of weight was unintentionally left in the car after the engine was installed.
"During that process one bag, usually we have kind of a tray on top of the radiator, which is a normal place to put that ballast because you need the water weight that you don’t have in there and during that process," Geisler said. "Somewhere along the way, one of the five-pound bags slid down the carbon duct work in front of it and kind of just was laying on top of the carbon duct work. It’s a black bag with black duct work and that’s it. That’s what it takes."
Moving forward, Geisler says Penske will include a weight bag checklist as part of its pre-race checklist prior to loading the car into the hauler.
"Normally, guys would just add ballast bags until the car was at weight," Geisler explained. "Now there needs to be a count. It’s just the same as when doctors go into surgery, they know what they have, they know what tools they have so they don’t leave any in or behind. That’s the same thing we need to be doing. That’s a piece of our process that has to get tightened up.
"It’s one that has definitely changed through this process (due to COVID-19) because we are really trying to compartmentalize our people at the shop so the guys who are setting the cars up, the guys who are going to the racetrack with them, the guys in the assembly shop, we’re trying to keep all that as separate as possible, so that if somebody does have an issue we don’t wipe out our entire team."
Geisler said that moving forward, bright orange tape will be added to the black bags as a precautionary measure, so the infraction doesn’t happen again.
Now Geisler is looking towards Richmond and Bristol and digging the 12 team out of a deficit.
"It’s unfortunate when issues compound like that, but they happen and you’ve got to look at it and say Bristol has been a great track for Ryan," Geisler said. "He’s been really fast there. We know we’ve got that one circled and you look at Richmond is one where maybe we haven’t been so great, so we’ve our work cut out for us.
"That’s one we were hoping to not have to go and run right up in the top five with him, but that’s’ what we’ve got to go do. He knows what he has to do and the team does, so sometimes most championship runs or people who make it deep in, at some point in that process they’ve had a bad race, they needed a mulligan, they had a disaster. It’s just one you’ve got to overcome."
