Ryan Blaney, who came into Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series Dollar Tree 301 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway seeking his second consecutive win at the 1.058-mile speedway, had control of the race as he collected the Stage 2 win. At this point, it seemed like running the rest of the race would be a mere formality, as Blaney is one of the best closers in the sport when he has a car capable of winning.
Race Results: Dollar Tree 301 at New Hampshire
That’s when fate intervened on pit road. Blaney’s pit crew, which was maligned early in the season but has since stabilized, made a critical error that cost Blaney a lot of track position heading into the final Stage of the race.
As Blaney attempted to work his way back through the field and into contention for the race win, fate once again intervened as the left-rear wheel detached from William Byron’s No. 24 Chevrolet on Lap 233, which sent him crashing into the Turn 4 wall.
This caution sent the field back to pit road, and this is where Blaney and his crew chief, Jonathan Hassler, changed their fortunes.
Hassler made a gusty two-tire strategy call, which netted Blaney the race lead.
“Yeah, that made it difficult,” Blaney said of the pit road miscue that put them behind. “No, it was a good call after our issue on pit road. We did two at the end to try to hopefully get the lead, and we did.”
With 63 laps remaining in the race, when it went back green, it was going to be a challenge for Blaney to hold off those on four tires, but he is one of the best drivers in the sport today, and he had the best car in the field.
“It was a long, long run to the end, longest run we had,” Blaney explained of the late-race green-flag stretch. “Just tried to manage my stuff. Knew the four-tire guys would pressure me eventually. Bubba came on hard there. Just tried to manage the lap traffic and manage the tire, not make a mistake.”
In the end, it wasn’t easy, as Bubba Wallace and Josh Berry applied pressure in the closing laps, and Blaney was fighting hard through lapped traffic. But in the end, a mistake by Wallace with a few laps remaining gave Blaney the breathing room he needed to win the race.
Blaney would cross the finish line ahead of Wallace by 0.586 seconds, while Berry crossed the finish line in third.
This victory marks Blaney’s third of the 2026 season, and it is the driver’s 20th in 403 career starts.
Wallace was chasing Blaney down and had a chance to top his best friend in the closing laps, but when he locked up his brakes with a few laps to go, Wallace said that essentially ended his bid to win.
“It did. I picked up a big vibration on the left front. That was kind of it,” Wallace explained. “So… Made our great day go to crap and salvaging what we had.”
While it was not a second-career win for Berry, the third-place finisher, it was another valuable finish for a driver looking for a ride for next season.
Berry now has four consecutive top-10 finishes, including a pair of top-fives. Berry lamented errors on his final pit stop sequence, which caused him to have to fight so hard to work himself back into contention for the win.
“I slid a little long in the last stop. Pit stop was a little slower, too,” Berry explained of the final pit stop. “Gave up too much track position early. Fought hard to get back through there, man. That was everything I had. Everything I could do today. It was pretty good, I’ll say that, too.”
Christopher Bell secured another solid finish with a fourth-place result, and he was followed across the finish line by Kyle Larson, who locked up his berth in the Chase with a fifth-place finish.
Speaking of the Chase, Denny Hamlin officially secured the No. 1 seed for the Chase with a seventh-place finish on Sunday. That seeding will come with a 25-point advantage for Hamlin when the Chase begins in a couple of weeks at Darlington Raceway.
With one race remaining until the Chase, Shane van Gisbergen holds the final slot inside the Chase, and he has a 31-point advantage over Ryan Preece, heading into Daytona International Speedway, where anything can, and usually does, happen.
Sunday’s race started under wet-weather conditions, and with wet-weather tires bolted to the cars, nobody was better than van Gisbergen.
SVG led 30 laps, and extended his lead to more than seven seconds before NASCAR made the call to bring the field back down pit road for slick tires on Lap 42.
Van Gisbergen wasn’t nearly as stout on the slick tires and faded to a 20th-place finish, one lap off the pace.
Next up for the NASCAR Cup Series is the Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona International Speedway. The regular-season finale race is scheduled for Saturday, August 29, and will be televised on NBC. TV coverage for the race is set to kick off at 7:30 PM ET, while the Motor Racing Network and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio will provide the radio broadcast for the event.
