LAS VEGAS — A Round of 8 that offered so much hope provided so much heartbreak for Ryan Blaney a year ago.
He’s back today at Las Vegas Motor Speedway to continue his quest to reach the championship race for the first time.
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Two mistakes cost Blaney the chance for a title last season. He wrecked at Las Vegas and followed it a week later by spinning on the warm-up lane at Homestead after a pit stop.
Blaney entered last year’s Las Vegas three points out of the final transfer spot to the championship race. He finished fifth in the first stage and won the second stage, giving him 16 stage points.
He was running second when he lost control of his car and hit the wall.
“You have to focus on the bigger picture,” Blaney said Saturday at Las Vegas. “I think that was my mistake last year. I didn’t really focus on the bigger picture when I wrecked here.”
His mistake, he said, was to be so focused on winning that it caused him to make a mistake and instead of a top-five finish at worse, he placed 28th.
“I thought we had a great shot to win this thing last year, had a great car and I just made a mistake,” Blaney said. “You have to seize the opportunity, but you have to also understand your limitations.
“Just getting caught up in the moment is easy in these playoffs and not focusing on the end of these races. Hey, if we’re running second last year, you’re still in a good shop. You never know what can happen. You hate to have wins slip away. Wrecking is a lot worse than running second. I think just managing kind of your mindset in those situations is super important.”
It’s a lesson Kyle Larson learned in the previous round of this year’s playoffs. He spun while racing Bubba Wallace for the lead with 18 laps left at Texas. Larson finished 35th.
“We had good first two stages,” he said of that Texas race, “and you think like ‘Oh, I’ve had a great couple of stages, I can be aggressive here’ and then you look like an idiot when you crash and you’re two points above the cutline at the end of the race vs. 30.
“You still can’t lose focus of points. Like points to me matter just as much as getting a win if you’re having a good day.”
That will be on Blaney’s mind today. He enters the race last among the eight playoff drivers but the gap from first to eighth in points is the closest in this round the start of stage racing in 2017.
While he focuses on today’s race, he won’t forget what happened last year.
“When you make mistakes like that, you hope you learn from them,” said Blaney, who starts 12th today. “It’s important to move on from them, but you have to learn from them first.”