Blaney feeling 'all right' after headaches in Vegas
Today at 12:15 PM
Ryan Blaney says he is feeling fine after complaining of a headache last weekend after taking a driver's side hit during practice at Las Vegas Motor Speedway because of a tire puncture.
In the race the following day, he was involved in a multi-car crash on lap 89 on the frontstretch when Brad Keselowski clipped his car as Keselowski came back across the racetrack.
The hit also broke the toe link, and that didn't help matters either as Blaney described flopping around in the cockpit as he drove his damaged car back to pit road.
"I'm feeling all right," Blaney told reporters at Homestead-Miami in a video posted by Bob Pockrass of Fox Sports. "Yeah, a couple of hard hits. I've had more hard hits than I'd like, especially recently in the last year and a half or so, two years. But I'm doing OK.
"Our team does a good job of doing all we can in the car to try to make sure we're as safe as we can be, and there's some other tweaks with the car that we've got to continue to work on. But I'm feeling all right."
Blaney asked for Advil or something of that nature to help his head during last Sunday's race. He admitted afterwards his head was "killing me," and he got short relief from what his Team Penske team gave him but it started to hurt again before the checkered flag.
In 2023, Blaney had two frontal impacts that he spoke at length about because of their lingering effects. Blaney crashed into a wall that was not protected with a SAFER barrier at Nashville Superspeedway in June, and said he had concussion-like symptoms the week after. But he didn't miss a race and worked with Dr. Michael Collins of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Sports Medicine Concussion program in the days after the Nashville race.
Blaney also crashed head-first at Daytona International Speedway in August when he was right-rear hooked in the draft in Turn 4. Because he wears a data mouthpiece, Blaney said the Daytona crash registered at a 70G impact.
When asked if there needs to be more changes to the Next Gen car to help with impacts, Blaney said "definitely" and it's something to be discussed with NASCAR during the offseason.
"I plan on doing that," Blaney said. "I feel like they've done a really good job of helping the front and the rear impacts; those were kind of the big things and I've had the unfortunate pleasure of feeling a lot of the big front and rear impacts, and they have gotten better.
"That was kind of my first big hit with a side impact, so I feel like the next step is how do you get the center section of these cars to be a little bit more forgiving. We've worked the front, rear, and done a pretty good job.
"You look at the car last week after the practice crash, and it just looked like it was scraped on the left side. There was no huge body damage. It's just all brick right there. So, we've got to do a little bit and hopefully we can figure that out and help those impacts."
