Ryan Blaney went back-to-back at New Hampshire Motor Speedway on Sunday, holding off Bubba Wallace by .586 seconds to win the rain-delayed Dollar Tree 301 and send a message heading into the Chase: Team Penske’s No. 12 team intends to be a championship favorite.
It was Blaney’s third win of the season and 20th of his career, coming two weeks before NASCAR’s 10-race Chase begins. The race was defined by shifting conditions — a rain delay, roughly 40 laps run on wet-weather tires before the track dried out, and nine caution periods — before clear skies took over for the final stretch. Blaney led a race-high 115 laps and also won Stage 2, his series-leading seventh stage victory of the year.
The win didn’t come easily. Blaney dropped out of the top five during a prolonged mid-race pit stop caused by a loose lug nut, shuffling him back through the field before his team’s final pit call — taking only two tires instead of four — put him back in position to retake the lead late. “It was a good call after our issue on pit road,” Blaney said afterward, adding that he spent the closing laps managing lapped traffic and tire wear while Wallace closed in behind him.
Wallace, chasing his first win of the season, applied heavy pressure over the final laps before locking his brakes with six to go, costing him any real shot at catching Blaney. He described picking up a vibration in his left front tire late in the run.
Blaney’s win keeps him second in the championship standings, 77 points behind Joe Gibbs Racing’s Denny Hamlin, who finished seventh Sunday despite his own pit-road miscue. That result was enough to lock Hamlin in as the No. 1 seed heading into the Chase — meaning even if Blaney wins next week’s regular-season finale and claims maximum points, he’ll still fall two points short of catching Hamlin for the top seed, according to updated Chase standings.
Hamlin was one of seven drivers already locked into the 16-driver Chase field; six more clinched spots Sunday, including reigning series champion Kyle Larson (fifth-place finish), Joey Logano, who rallied to 14th after an early-race incident, and Chris Buescher. Carson Hocevar’s 19th-place run secured his first career Chase berth, while William Byron and Daniel Suarez also formally locked in their spots. Three Chase positions remain open, with Wallace holding a 75-point cushion at the cutoff line in 14th. On the bubble, Ryan Preece’s ninth-place finish cut his deficit to roughly half of what it had been, and he now trails 20th-place finisher Shane van Gisbergen by 31 points with one regular-season race left.
Josh Berry turned in one of the day’s more notable runs, finishing third for his third straight top-five at New Hampshire and fourth consecutive top-10 of the season — a stretch the historic Wood Brothers Racing team hasn’t seen since 1994, when Morgan Shepherd drove for them. The run comes as Berry drives without a confirmed ride for 2027, after Wood Brothers announced he won’t return next season.
NASCAR’s regular season wraps up Saturday, August 29, with the Coke Zero Sugar 400 under the lights at Daytona International Speedway, the race that will set the final 16-driver Chase field.
