Ryan Blaney's 2024 season has been eerily reminiscent of his 2023 championship season

Ryan Blaney winning the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series championship wouldn't have been a realistic scenario at the start of the playoffs last fall. 

Blaney sat just 13th in points after the regular-season finale at Daytona, but thanks to five top-six finishes in the final six races of the season, he was able to catapult himself not just into NASCAR's championship race, but to the championship podium itself. 

Coming into the 2024 season, Blaney had the highest expectations of his career placed on his shoulders. Representing the most prestigious auto-racing series in the country as champion is no easy task, but Blaney seemed to embrace the role over the first four weeks of the season, collecting three top-five finishes and leading 12 laps in the season-opening Daytona 500. 

The last nine races for Blaney have featured less than stellar results, though, with the No. 12 car coming home inside the top-10 just twice in the past nine events. 

Rather than hitting the panic button, Blaney and the No. 12 team have good reason to relax. Not only does Blaney still sit 55 points above the playoff cutline – nearly a full race up on 17th place driver Bubba Wallace – but he is the defending winner of the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte, the next race on NASCAR's calendar. 

Along with being the defending winner of one of NASCAR's crown jewel events, Blaney's 2023 and 2024 season have a few interesting parallels that should ease any discomfort felt by the driver or his team. 

Heading into the Coca-Cola 600 in 2023, Blaney sat seventh in the Cup Series points standings. Heading into this year's edition of the Coke 600, Blaney sits eighth. While he had accumulated two more top-10 finishes at this point in the season last year, he has shown similar speed to start 2024 as he did in 2023. 

Blaney would certainly like to already have a win or two to his credit this season, but the fact that it took until Charlotte for him to win his first race in an eventual championship season proves that he has an invaluable trait for racing in modern-day NASCAR – he can get hot at the right time. Whether it be on a late-race restart or the final two rounds of the playoffs, making the right moves at the right time, as Blaney did last year to win the championship, is what pays in a sport that is becoming increasingly less about consistency and more about spurts of speed. 

While Blaney did lead 163-of -400 laps in last year's Coca-Cola 600, he didn't take the lead for good until the third stage. Despite a relatively mediocre season through the first 30 races of 2023, Blaney and the No. 12 team came alive over the final six races, which culminated in their first championship. 

The similarities between Blaney's 2023 and 2024 season through the first 13 races may end up meaning nothing, but if Blaney can find a way to win Sunday's Coca-Cola 600 for the second year in a row, it may spell trouble for a field that finally views Blaney as a perennial title threat.