"I don’t think he got the shot he really deserved": When Ryan Blaney reflected on his father’s NASCAR career
2023 Cup Series Champion Ryan Blaney is the son of former NASCAR driver Dave Blaney, who competed in the top tier of the stock car racing from 2000 to 2014. During his career, the senior Blaney competed at the Cup level for lesser teams, which has led his son to believe that he wasn't given a fair chance to perform in the sport.
In an interview from May 2017, Ryan Blaney opened up about how his father did not recieve the opportunity he should've received.
“I don’t think he got the shot he really deserved,” the then-Wood Brothers Racing driver said.
Dave Blaney made the jump to the Cup Series after spending time racing with sprint cars. He was 37 years old when he made his debut driving full-time for Bill Davis Racing in 2000, which is a tough age to be a newcomer to the sport.
“Like anything late in life, when you’re a rookie at something at 36 or 37, it’s not going to go very far. Even at my age, it was still odd to make the jump from sprint cars. That was pretty uncommon," Dave Blaney said [via The New York Times].
During his career in the Cup Series, Dave Blaney had 473 starts, out of which he scored four Top-fives and 28 Top 10 finishes. Two of his Top-10 finishes came from his singular full-time stint with Richard Childress Racing during the 2005 season. The last season Blaney competed in was the 2014 season, where he participated in seven races, three for Randy Humphrey Racing and four for Tommy Baldwin Racing.
In 2017, the same year of the interview, Ryan Blaney was in his second full-time season in the Cup Series driving for the Wood Brothers team. He would finish that season ninth in the standings, after scoring his first win at the Pocono Raceway as well as achieving four Top-five and 14 Top-10 finishes.
Ryan Blaney discusses how drivers can get a wider fan base
Before he joined the Cup Series, Ryan Blaney spent some time racing in the Trucks Series, where he accumulated four wins driving for Brad Keselowski Racing. This gave him an opportunity to race at other tracks before going to the Cup Series, which he says is key in building out a fanbase.
In the interview from May 2017, Blaney said [via NYT]:
“The more you go to different racetracks, the more fans you get. Suppose we go back to some place we haven’t been to in a long time, or a whole new place. That’s a new spectrum of fans. That just widens the fan base out.”
In 2025, Ryan Blaney has achieved a Top-10 finish at the Daytona 500 when he crossed the finish line to take seventh place. He has also scored a Top-five finish when he completed the race at the Atlanta Motor Speedway in fourth, after starting the race with in pole position.
Later today, Blaney will race at the Homestead-Miami Speedway event, for which he has qualified in sixth place.