Blaney Wins Wild Talladega Race

Originally written for CLNS Media.

Ryan Blaney won the 1000Bulbs.com 500 from Talladega Superspeedway on Monday afternoon to lock himself into the next round of the Playoffs.

The first stage of the race was run on Sunday, but rain postponed the rest of the race until Monday afternoon.  After a calm first half of the race, the second brought chaos that shuffled the running order.

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Numerous big wrecks took out many of the front runners, and it set up for a two-lap sprint to the finish.  Blaney lined up first, and he quickly cleared Aric Almirola to take control on the restart.  He held onto the lead until the final turn, when Ryan Newman and Denny Hamlin pushed their way to the front.

Blaney and Newman made contact in the trioval, and Blaney was able to beat Newman to the finish line by .007 seconds.

Blaney said he couldn’t block Newman’s run if he wanted a chance at the victory.

“There was no blocking the 6 [of Newman] and the 11 [of Hamlin], they were coming so fast,” Blaney said.  “I figured I’d give up the bottom and they were just going to leave me in the middle.”

Blaney said the push from Almirola was able to give him enough momentum to get past Newman at the end.

“I can’t thank Almirola enough for helping me out there at the end; he was a great pusher all day,” Blaney said.  “[Newman] kind of pushed me below the yellow line…I definitely wasn’t going to go below the line before we made contact.”

Newman said he didn’t want to think of all the things he could have done to gain the .007 seconds that stood between him and the victory.

“I could have pinched him some more, I probably could have took the air,” Newman said.  “I saw the guys spinning in the back and I was hoping there’d be a yellow but there wasn’t.”

“We overcame a lot of obstacles, had cars flying on top of us and all that stuff; just proud of the team.”

Unofficial results:

1. Ryan Blaney

2. Ryan Newman

3. Denny Hamlin

4. Aric Almirola

5. Michael McDowell

6. Austin Dillon

7. Corey LaJoie

8. Chase Elliott

9. Ricky Stenhouse Jr.

10. Ty Dillon

11. Joey Logano

12. Ross Chastain

13. Matt Tifft

14. Landon Cassill

15. Parker Kligerman

16. Paul Menard

17. Kevin Harvick

18. Ryan Preece

19. Kyle Busch

20. Chris Buescher

21. Daniel Hemric

22. Reed Sorenson

23. Clint Bowyer

24. Bubba Wallace

25. Brad Keselowski

26. Martin Truex Jr.

27. Brendan Gaughan

28. Kurt Busch

29. David Ragan

30. Matt DiBenedetto

31. Blake Jones

32. Daniel Suarez

33. William Byron

34. Erik Jones

35. Austin Theriault

36. Joey Gase

37. Alex Bowman

38. Jimmie Johnson

39. Kyle Larson

40. Spencer Boyd

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