Losing sucks — plain and simple.
Losing week after week for a year or more can take a toll, but the wait can be worth it.
That was obvious the night of May 29, on the frontstretch of Charlotte Motor Speedway, as a friendly crowd cheered for the winner of the Coca-Cola 600.
“I might shed a tear,” Ryan Blaney said minutes after taking the checkered flag in his No. 12 Team Penske Ford.
Blaney had gone 59 races without a NASCAR Cup Series victory. His last triumph came in the August 2021 race at Daytona Int’l Speedway. In the span between victories, Blaney had led more than 800 laps and finished among the top five 18 times, including four runner-up results.
The third-generation driver even had a shot at winning the 2022 Daytona 500 until teammate Austin Cindric threw a well-timed block coming to the checkered flag that bounced Blaney into the outside wall.
While Cindric ended up with his first career win, Blaney wound up being the only driver in last season’s Cup Series playoffs without a victory.
“You start to feel like you can’t win anymore when you don’t win in a while,” Blaney said on the Charlotte frontstretch. “It kind of gets hard.”
He later explained why the previous year-and-a-half had been harder on him than one might expect from the usually even-keeled driver.
“I’m not the most self-confident person out there to begin with,” Blaney said. “So when I do get in doubt of my abilities to do something, it’s really hard to pull myself out of it, at least for me personally, just because I don’t have that self-confidence that some guys have. It takes me a little bit more convincing.”
Some drivers, at least those who are on the back-end of their careers, often say a variation of the same statement: “You never know when you’re celebrating your last win.”
Blaney says that thought never crossed his mind.
“You just start doubting yourself, like, ‘Am I good enough to compete?’” Blaney said. “‘Am I as good as I was a year ago? Can I still do this? Am I progressing and getting smarter as a race car driver and still have the same skills I had two years ago?’”
Fifty-nine races may have been rough for Blaney, but in the grand scheme of things, he got off easy. He could have had it as bad as Martin Truex Jr.
Before Truex was a championship-winning Cup Series driver, he endured a 218-race winless streak, which at the time was the second longest behind Bill Elliott’s 226-race drought that lasted from 1994 to 2001.
Truex’s time in the wilderness stretched from his first career triumph at Dover (Del.) Motor Speedway in 2007 to win No. 2 at California’s Sonoma Raceway in 2013.
He was a “friggin’ mess” after taking the checkered flag in Wine Country.
“I had to stop and start doing doughnuts because I had no clue what I was doing,” Truex said after that win 10 years ago. “I calmed down a little bit. And I just wanted to make sure I took my time going back, because I remember at Dover, it all happened way too fast. And you never know when you’re gonna get that opportunity. …
“You can’t explain the feeling, when it’s been that long and you work so hard, and you’ve been so close … when you think at times, ‘Man, is this ever going to happen again?’”
Truex’s streak of futility was eventually bested.
In 2016, then Front Row Motorsports driver Chris Buescher pulled a rabbit out of his hat when he won a fog-shortened race at Pocono Raceway to claim his first Cup Series victory. It came in his 27th career start.
Buescher waited until September 2022 at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway (222 races) before he made a return visit to victory lane.
The driver from Prosper, Texas, approaches the concept of losing streaks from a big-picture perspective.
“It hurts, but at the same time, the way I’ve always seen our sport is you look at the most dominant seasons in the last few decades,” Buescher told SPEED SPORT. “And I think like Carl Edwards didn’t win the championship in (2008), but he won eight, nine times.
“Twenty-five percent of the season they won, right?
“That feels like an absolute dominant season. That means they lost 75 percent of time. And they lost the title. At that number, you got to realize our sport is not 50-50. It’s not one team or the other winning a game. It’s one in 36, 37, whatever it might be. And it’s hard. It’s really hard.”
Buescher acknowledges there was a period in his drought — which covered his time at Front Row Motorsports, JTD Daugherty Racing and RFK Racing — when it was “brutal.”
“We kind of slowly drug along,” Buescher said. “I remember so many times when you finish sixth, fourth, eighth and you’re trying to take that as your good days.
“And they were good days. … But without the wins, it’s hard to live off of just decent runs.”
During his tenure at JTG Daugherty Racing, Buescher overlapped for two years with teammate A.J. Allmendinger. If there’s anyone who knows the ordeal of a losing streak, it’s him.
Like Buescher, Allmendinger only has two Cup Series victories. The first came in 2014 at Watkins Glen (N.Y.) Int’l. The follow-up didn’t come until 2021 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Road Course. The wins were separated by 161 starts and seven years, two of which Allmendinger didn’t compete in the Cup Series.
While discussing losing streaks, Allmendinger cites an exchange with his old team owner, former NBA player Brad Daugherty.
“That’s the one thing in this sport, you’re not guaranteed a victory,” Allmendinger said. “I used to love talking to Brad about his basketball background, his side of it and all that. At one point I said, ‘The difference between racing and every other sport is you’re probably guaranteed a win at some point in every other sport.’ You may not win a lot. I think the worst basketball record ever was 9-73.
“I’m like, ‘At least for those nine games, they felt good about themselves,’” Allmendinger concluded.
This story appeared in the August 23, 2023 edition of the SPEED SPORT Insider.
