Ryan Blaney led the most laps in the Quaker State 400 Available at Walmart at EchoPark Speedway, but he had to retake the lead on the final lap to win it.
The race was red-flagged after the first stage due to rain and the restart delayed three hours, which pushed the finish to 1:45 a.m. ET on Monday.
Blaney won the pole and the first two stages, but found himself lined up second next to Carson Hocevar for an overtime finish after a Kyle Larson wreck with six laps to go brought out the yellow flag.
Blaney jumped out to the lead with a push from Bubba Wallace on the inside, but Hocevar got a big run on the backstretch with Tyler Reddick and was leading by two car lengths at the start of the final lap.
Blaney and Wallace stuck together, however, and Blaney got a run on the outside to get next to Hocevar, then picked up a push from Christopher Bell moved him to the lead coming out of Turn 4 and he made it stick to the checkered flag.
“Pretty wild. Second, okay, take the front row and we’ll see who can get behind me. Bubba gave me really good shoves on the restart. We got hooked up really good. Then, yeah, gosh, Bubba and I got a huge run down the front straightaway. Bubba went three-wide bottom town the back, lined up for a really cool finish at the line,” Blaney said.
“I really have to shout-out Christopher Bell for being right on my bumper all the way through three and four. He was a big reason why we won the race. Appreciate that, Christopher.”
Wallace finished in second on the track, but was penalized for crossing the inside line and was scored 29th, which made Bell the runner-up ahead of Hocevar, Ty Gibbs and Erik Jones.
Blaney finished the night with 171 of 263 laps led and his win was the 750th for Ford in the NASCAR Cup Series. No winner had led more laps on a drafting track since Richard Petty’s 184 in the 1964 Daytona 500. Blaney chalked it up to years of experience that taught him to be patient.
“At that point down the backstretch we still had a lap and a half to go. I could be in worse spots. I don’t want to take a chance of getting turned because I made kind of a foolish block when they were going 10 miles an hour faster than me. Somebody is going to come on the body, going to get there. I hope it gets there good enough where we can still make a run at it,” he said.
The win moved Blaney to 65 points behind 12th-place finisher Denny Hamlin in third in the regular season standings with six races to go, while Tyler Reddick finished eighth to hold on to second just 24 points behind Hamlin.
