“It’s a death sentence,” Ryan Blaney said while complaining about the Brickyard 400 results. It seemed like Kyle Larson and NASCAR collectively did him dirty there on the final laps. Although the rules tilted in Larson’s favor, Blaney could not help but shed tears about his narrow shave with victory. This is just one example of how NASCAR can be immensely taxing as a sport.

However, fans are mostly just aware of the tip of the iceberg. Motorsports can easily be shrugged off as one of the easier sports, but therein lies a colossal misconception. And Ryan Blaney is more than willing to expand on this topic, especially after returning from Indianapolis.

Ryan Blaney reveals NASCAR’s thorny side

Team Penske had more than one reason to chafe with agony after Kyle Larson grabbed the trophy. Roger Penske owns IndyCar and Indianapolis Motor Speedway. So despite notching his first-ever podium result at the Brickyard, Ryan Blaney fell slightly short of making his team owner proud. NASCAR tried to dispel any confusion about the last-lap caution, but the incident is still swirling inside Blaney’s head.

Although he has stopped talking about it directly, Ryan Blaney is choosing other related topics. NASCAR journalist Jeff Gluck of the Athletic recently interviewed the No. 12 driver and asked him about what most fans miss in the sport. Blaney harped on the difficulty: “How hard it is. And that’s with any professional sport. I have no idea what it’s like to try and hit a 100-mile-per-hour fastball. I know it’s extremely difficult, but I have never put myself in those shoes. It’s the same with racing.” Reminding us about Brickyard, he added, “You don’t know how difficult it is to try to be on the edge of control every lap without stepping over it.”

Then Ryan Blaney expanded on the intricacies of being a winning driver in the sport. “How do you work on your car and your racecraft to try to get to that level of speed, and how do you beat the 38 other people out there around you? Anyone can drive a race car, but how the heck do you go faster than everybody else? That’s the hardest part about it, is trying to find that grip and limit. People who don’t race don’t have that experience of actually how difficult it is to be good and successful as a race car driver.”

Indeed, spending a little time in the cockpit of a car can be incredibly taxing for an ordinary soul. Yet NASCAR and other motorsports drivers continue to do it every weekend or every other day. The mental and physical exhaustion involved is often taken for granted, as a research team demonstrated.

You need to be tough to win in a racecar

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Ryan Blaney only touched upon the difficulty of maneuvering the high speeds of a racecar in a highly competitive field. But that is the talk of the 2023 Championship title defender. So he is already talking from the level of the clouds. There is a long, patchy road to cover to get to that point – as a team from the University of Florida and Michigan State University demonstrated. Firstly, the physical effort of driving a racecar is loads different from driving your mom’s minivan. Strength, endurance, and hand-eye coordination are some of the unique challenges that racecar drivers face.

Then the high speeds and the special engineering of a racecar mandate forceful turning and breaking. Drivers control the vehicle by constantly engaging the muscles of the arms, upper body, and legs. In a 2012 interview, IndyCar veteran Dario Franchitti explained: “There’s tremendous kickback through the steering wheel, and there’s no power steering, so every movement of the wheel requires a lot of energy.” He learned that he needed 35 pounds of force just to steer, and an extra 135 pounds to brake. “Imagine a string tied to your hand where you have to pull that 35 pounds up or down constantly.”

In addition to this is the massive heat that drivers put up with at 300-400 mile races for hours on end. “Most of what we deal with is just the heat,” Jeff Gordon said in a 2016 interview. In summer, cockpit temperatures can exceed 135 degrees Fahrenheit (57 Celsius), leading to profuse sweating, dehydration, and even heatstroke. Couple this heat with a desperate drive to win, and you can get a battered state of mental health for drivers.

Hence Ryan Blaney is spot-on in his analysis that NASCAR is tremendously hard as a sport. The difficulty lies not just in Victory Lane narratives but also in the basic driving of a racecar.