How the NASCAR race at Nashville was won and lost

Ryan Blaney celebrated this one with an extra chutzpah.

After winning the Cracker Barrel 400 at Nashville Superspeedway on Sunday night, Blaney lit up a cigar and was enjoying a little drinky-drink in Victory Lane and soaked this one up a little bit longer than every celebration that wasn’t his championship.

It’s been something of an uneven season for Blaney to this point with a lot of finishes in the top 10, matched only by the amount of misfortune they have also suffered through at various points — three crashes and two engine failures.

So now, they’ve officially won and locked themselves into the playoffs, and yeah, the driver is going to soak this one up a bit.

“Yeah, I think it means a lot because you said it perfectly, just been pretty rocky this year and had a lot of misfortune and a lot of down times, just crappy things happening to us,” Blaney said. “It’s like, ‘man, what do we got to do to just finish these races or close one out and just kind of things go our way.’

“So, I think that was more — it’s kind of like, I don’t want to say relief but just like, ‘okay, finally nothing crazy happened’ and we were able to just run our own race and bring the speed and execute and do our job very, very well.

“It was nice to finally get in Victory Lane tonight after a rocky start to the year.”

Again, it’s not like Blaney, Jonathan Hassler and the No. 12 team have been bad but the modern Cup Series is defined not by the consistency of their seventh place standing but the playoff points they can accumulate before and after that final 10-race stretch.  

“Being top 10 in points matter in the regular season,” Blaney said. “It’s playoff points. You still want to run well and you still want to win races but it does matter. It just kind of sets it all at ease, like okay, we’re in the playoffs. All that stuff is good. Nice to finally get the monkey off your back and win a race and then move on and go try to win more.”

Blaney was not smoking that cigar, by the way, upon reaching the media center for this post-race press conference.

“They made me put it out before I got in here, unfortunately.”

How it was won

Barring a dramatic late caution, and remember this race produced five overtimes last year, the race was over once the final pit stop commenced.

The only other question was whether or not a significant tire advantage would be enough to overcome a track that locked down to a single groove by the end of the night.

Denny Hamlin took his tires much later and Carson Hocevar took his much sooner and none of it mattered because Blaney had the track position.

“I thought that (Blaney) showed in the really long run in practice, that he was a lot better,” Hamlin said. “Not a lot better than us but just better than some other cars and we never really ran that long until we got in the race and it was around Lap 40 to 45 in a run and his car lost a lot less speed than mine.

“Mine went off a cliff and got loose and a lot of the cars I was running around got loose too.”

But Hamlin and Hocevar couldn’t even move up the race track to change the handling of their cars because the track changed in a way that left everyone running single file.

“Yeah, it’s because the track actually narrowed that last run,” Hamlin said. “So on these concrete tracks, there’s rubber dust that flies off and goes one lane to the right of wherever we run and there wasn’t enough cars running the middle lane so everyone just went to the bottom and starting spraying dust in the middle lane.

“And so if you try to go anywhere at the very bottom, it was like ice. I mean it was ice out there. I mean, I nearly wrecked a bunch and every time Carson moved up, he was out of control. So it was just really weird to see that last run — everyone pinned to the bottom, couldn’t move and it just was because there was not enough cars running that middle. And then once it started getting slick, everyone just migrated down and made it worse.”

So the race came down to whether or not there was a strategy for Chris Gayle to deploy to get Hamlin out front or for Rudy Fugle to do the same for William Byron.

There simply wasn’t.

“Not really,” Gayle said. “We were already a couple seconds back from Blaney before that cycle even started. And so looking at it, we didn’t think we were going to be able to undercut him either way and hold onto the position.

“Like, he would have covered us if we came down because they would know that that’s the race.”

Gayle was also in a fuel window and needed those extra laps to pay for how they ran in the first half of the run.

“So we felt like our only shot at doing it was running long and catching that caution. And then obviously that allowed (Carson Hocevar)  who really undercut everybody by a lot to get that position and then just trapped us.

“It seemed like it was really hard there at the end to pass, right? Like guys could not get off the bottom. And earlier in the race, guys had least been able to use that next lane up just a little bit to kind of get the guys right rears and pass them. It looked like nobody could do that and that made it a little tough at the end.”

Fugle had the same mentality and also needed a caution.

“Our green flag cycle, we ran a little big longer, which could have worked or not worked but we didn’t have a good cycle,” Fugle said. “We had a bit of a slower stop and everything didn’t go as good as it could have but it only cost us one spot.

“It was just really hard to pass there at the end and we all needed to be the leader. … I wish I would’ve tried to give him the lead at the end of stage two if we waited a little bit for fuel, thought that would help us and just didn’t.”

And that’s what Hassler focused on, at one point, even deploying a two tire strategy to get Blaney the lead in Stage 2.

“I think from my seat we saw probably a little bit less falloff than we’ve seen here at Nashville before, and in those instances we definitely just try to make sure the car is in the cleanest air that we can get it in,” Hassler said. “Sometimes when that’s your focus, you might get what you want by pitting early, sometimes you might get it by pitting late, so we just watched where we were going to come out on track and try and get the best track position we could.”

Stenhouse and Hocevar

Ricky Stenhouse spun into the wall on Lap 91 and it came as a result of contact from Carson Hocevar.

Ride along with the Nos. 47 and 77. https://t.co/gOokWCrKQK pic.twitter.com/XeNdKPfP6W

— NASCAR (@NASCAR) June 2, 2025

The video snippet will show Stenhouse throwing a block on Hocevar but the issue stemmed over several laps.

“A lap or two before, he [Hocevar] tried to dive in there from about ten car lengths back and then that time, I just opened my entry a little bit and he over-charged the corner and drilled us in the rear bumper,” Stenhouse said.

“I’d say it’s not out of the norm from him, but I definitely wasn’t expecting that at that point of the race.  It’s just a bummer for us.”

Stenhouse also said ‘it was too early’ and lamented his first DNF of the season.

“It’s a bummer for our team,” Stenhouse. “Felt we executed really, really well at a high level this year to put us into position to point in. To now be out of the race and not get a chance to work on the car, it’s a real bummer.”

Stenhouse, who was famously fined $75,000 for punching Kyle Busch after the All Star Race last year said he would eventually talk to Hocevar about it but not on Sunday.

“That’s too expensive,” he said.

Hocevar, for his part, said he would be receptive to a good faith conversation.

As for what happened from his vantage point?

“I got a run and felt like I was there,” Hocevar said. “I felt like I was there enough to get a car inside. He probably could have cleared me, so that’s what I expected him to do, and he didn’t. When he checked up, I almost spun, too. I feel like it’s just a product of this.

“I feel like I could have gotten cut a break, too. I think it goes both ways or could go both ways.”

Results