Ryan Blaney updates health after hard hits, plans to meet with NASCAR

Ryan Blaney has entered the upper echelon of NASCAR wheelmen over the last couple of seasons, proving he’s one of the best in the sport last season by capturing the 2023 Cup Series title.

While there’s been a lot of celebrating for the No. 12 team over the past year, Blaney has also been involved in his fair share of accidents, including a bunch over the past couple of weeks. It’s led to some major hits, bumps and bruises for Blaney, as he looks to power through in search of back-to-back championships.

With that in mind, Blaney gave an update on his health heading into Homestead-Miami Speedway this weekend, revealing that he plans to meet with NASCAR regarding how the cars they’re driving can be made safer moving forward.

“I’m feeling alright. A couple hard hits. I’ve had more hard hits than I’d like, especially recently in last year and a half or so, two years. But yeah, I’m doing okay,” Blaney explained, via Bob Pockrass. “Our team does good job of, you know, doing all we can in the car to try to make sure we’re as safe as we can be. There’s some other tweaks with the cars that we’ve got to continue to work on. But, you know, feeling all right. … I definitely think changes need to be made. It’s something we can talk about during the off-season with NASCAR, and I plan on doing that. I feel like they’ve done a really good job of, you know, helping the front and the rear impacts. Those are kind of the big things. I’ve had the unfortunate pleasure of feeling a lot of the big front and rear impacts, and they have gotten better. That was kind of my first big hit with a side impact.

“I feel like the next step is like, how do you get the center section of these cars to be a little bit more forgiving? You know, we’ve worked on front rear and done a pretty good job, and now it’s just the, you know, you looked at that car last week, after the practice crash, and it just looked like it was scraped on the left side, like there was no huge body damage. It’s just this all — just break right there. So we’ve got to do a little bit. Hopefully we can figure that out and help those impacts.”

While Ryan Blaney is focused on winning, it’s awesome to see he’s taken such an interest in the safety of himself and his peers behind the wheel. If it leads to lesser impacts during inevitable wrecks for the field on the race track, it’ll be a fantastic revelation for NASCAR.

More on Ryan Blaney, NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs

Moreover, Ryan Blaney has taken some big hits lately on the racetrack, and with just two races remaining in the Round of 8, it’s fair to question if there will be any lingering issues moving forward. Blaney addressed just that as he turns the page to Homestead next Sunday.

“We’ll find out,” Blaney said. “I’ll be in Miami next week, though. I’ll tell you that.”

Las Vegas turned out to be a losing hand for Blaney, who saw his weekend derailed the moment his car came off the hauler. The crash in practice forced him to go to a backup car Sunday and the accident during the race made his car non-competitive. He did play a role in aiding Team Penske teammate Joey Logano to victory, playing defense on a hard-charging Christopher Bell in the closing laps. 

Blaney will get back at it at Homestead with a lot of ground to make up. After finishing 32nd at Las Vegas, the reigning Cup Series champion is 47 points below the cutline.

On3’s Nick Geddes contributed to this article.