It had been a season of frustration for Ryan Blaney through the opening 13 races of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series campaign. However, in race No. 14, Blaney flipped the script as he captured his first victory of the season in the Cracker Barrel 400 at Nashville Superspeedway on Sunday evening.
RESULTS: Cracker Barrel 400 at Nashville
Blaney said, despite the rough luck through the season’s opening 13 races, he never gave up hope because he knew his team had been bringing him really fast race cars to the track each and every week.
“I never gave up hope, that’s for sure,” Blaney said in his post-race interview on Prime Video. “We’ve had great speed all year. It just really hasn’t been the best year for us as far as fortune. But the 12 boys are awesome, they stick with it, no matter how it goes. And it was great to finish one out tonight.”
Blaney and crew chief Jonathan Hassler used a strategic two-tire pit stop call to get track position in Stage 1, and once they got track position, the No. 12 Team Penske Ford Mustang Dark Horse proved to be the best car in the 39-car field.
“I thought it was a good call. We drove up to [the] seventh [position] there in the first Stage. I thought two tires were great, my car was really good, and that really set us up for the rest of the race,” Blaney explained. “Great job by [Hassler] as always. All of the 12 boys appreciate what they do. The pit crew was great.”
Blaney, the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series champion, has secured his berth in the 2025 Playoffs with his 14th career NASCAR Cup Series win.
As he crossed the finish line on Lap 300 to register his race-high 139th lap led, Blaney defeated Carson Hocevar for the win by a margin of victory of 2.830 seconds.
Hocevar was slicing chunks off of Blaney’s lead in the early laps following the final pit stop of the night, but once he was trapped in lapped traffic, he stalled out and could never catch up to the eventual race winner.
“I was probably being a lot more vocal on the radio than I needed to be, but you’re just trying so hard and trying to find something that’s just not there,” Hocevar said. “We’re one spot short, again. But hopefully this is a step in the right direction.”
For the 22-year-old Hocevar, this marked his second runner-up finish of the season. The driver feels, despite the disappointment of finishing one spot short of the win again, that his No. 77 Spire Motorsports team is making some solid progress.
“I mean, it just proves how strong this group is. To go from the disappointment last week to having a really bad qualifying draw, qualifying really bad[ly], and sticking through it and having a shot. A shot, like a straightaway. But just proud of this group, Zeigler Auto Group, everybody that puts into this racecar, they deserve good finishes,” Hocevar stated.
Hamlin, the third-place finisher, made career start No. 700 on Sunday night, but it wasn’t a sure thing that he would race as his fiancee Jordan Fish reached her due date for the couple’s third child on Sunday. However, Fish didn’t go into labor, and Hamlin was able to race at Nashville.
The driver of the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota won the opening Stage of the race, but down the stretch, he lost the air flow to his helmet, and his drinking system in the car malfunctioned, which made things quite toasty inside the car. But regardless if those systems were working or not, Hamlin says he lacked speed on the long run to compete with Blaney for the win.
“I was hot. I don’t run a cool shirt or anything like that, so, that’s three elements that the other drivers had that I didn’t have. So, yeah, I got hot. I had to Carson Hocevar the helmet visor up there to try to get a little air in,” Hamlin quipped. “But just couldn’t run with [Blaney] there on the super long run, right? After 40 laps, I could maintain with him, but after that, he just pulled away and stretched it on us.”
Joey Logano, the defending winner of this event, came home in the fourth position, and he was followed by William Byron, Bubba Wallace, Erik Jones, Kyle Larson, Tyler Reddick, and Christopher Bell inside the top-10.
With his fifth-place finish, Byron extended his NASCAR Cup Series regular-season point lead over Kyle Larson to 48 points. Bell sits third in the standings at 88 points back, and Hamlin is fourth, 104 points back.
Chase Elliott, who finished 15th on the night, is now 105 points behind Byron in the standings.
Next up for the NASCAR Cup Series is a trip to Michigan International Speedway. The FireKeepers Casino 400 is scheduled for Sunday, June 8, and that race will be televised on Prime Video beginning at 2:00 PM ET. The Motor Racing Network (MRN) and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio will carry the radio broadcast for the race.
