Ryan Blaney: Blown engine in Daytona 500 doesn’t dampen enthusiasm

Well, my first Daytona 500 didn’t work out exactly as I thought it would. In fact, a blown engine was about the last thing I considered as a possibility considering the great reliability record of the Roush Yates Ford engines.

Yet that’s exactly what happened on lap 171 of the Great American Race. After battling back to run with the leaders following an early race brush with the wall, there we were pulling into the Motorcraft/Quick Lane garage with less than 30 laps to go. Fortunately my alliance partner at Team Penske, Joey Logano, managed to get his first Daytona 500 win. That was awesome!

Despite the engine trouble, we have a lot to look forward to this season at Wood Brothers Racing if how we ran at Daytona is any indication.

We started 12th because we ran well in the Budweiser Duels and raced to the ninth position at the 40-lap mark of the 500 before we got nudged into the Turn 4 wall by Tony Stewart. By the time we got out of the pits after that, we were all the way back to 40th place, but still on the lead lap.

The Motorcraft/Quick Lane team did a good job fixing it up, though. It was just an unfortunate deal. I thought we were close enough to the front where that wouldn’t happen, but it did.

I thought we were going to be OK after that and my crew chief, Jeremy Bullins, told me we’d be fine although I couldn’t see how bad the No. 21 was hurt. The crew kept working on it during pit stops and it kept getting better and I thought we were going to race good up there. We did right up until the engine blew up.

What really helped was a caution with 39 laps to go when Jeremy decided not to pit. We went from 32nd to 12th. I definitely thought it was the right call to get that track position back. Besides that, it seemed like our car handled better when we had track position. Toward the front of the pack you can get a little more air on the nose of the car, which helps.

It was working. We got as high as eighth place after 170 laps and were running in 13th when the engine let go very suddenly. Sometimes engines will vibrate bad or lose power a couple of laps before they go, but this one just went and that was that.

Overall, we had a good showing. We started off great and got some damage but worked our way back toward the front. While the Daytona 500 didn’t end like we wanted it to, there’s a lot of racing left in 2015 and we’ve got the Kobalt 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on March 8. That’s a track where I think we can really show what we can do.

Ryan Blaney is the son of Hartford native and former Sprint Cup driver Dave Blaney. His diary about his rookie season as a Sprint Cup driver with Wood Brothers Racing will appear periodically in The Vindicator.