Ryan Blaney’s Crew Chief Reveals Their “First Aha Moment” in Their Unprecedented Success in Post-Season

Ryan Blaney’s heroics in 2023 wouldn’t have been possible without the ingenuity of one person: Jonathan Hassler. The championship-winning season was also Hassler’s second year as the crew chief of Team Penske’s #12 Ford Mustang. Despite his relatively shorter tenure in working with Blaney, Hassler had known enough about the driver and his car to catapult Team Penske to consecutive championships. Days after the historic day at Phoenix where the driver finished P2 and clinched his first title, Hassler reveals the one moment in which he knew that the #12 team had the potential to achieve something big in 2023.

Jonathan Hassler looks back at the moment when his crew had shown him its capability

Though his association with Blaney is still fairly new, Hassler has been with Team Penske since 2008. Joining the outfit as a race engineer fresh out of Purdue University, he found himself championing the #12 car and Ryan Blaney 14 years later. In the 2022 season, the Hassler-Blaney combination was a symbol of consistency. The duo got nine stage wins and ended the season with an average finish of 13.6. A year later, they now find themselves in a much higher stand than they were at the end of 2022.

Talking on SiriusXM’s NASCAR radio, Hassler was asked about the one point in the 2023 season where he’d realized the potential that his team carried. Looking back at the turbulent year, he said, “I think you know Charlotte really, rewinded back to the middle of the year, was the first “Aha” moment for us.”

“It wasn’t any one thing special.” Despite giving credits to the Charlotte win, the crew chief underlined that he did not see any “one” particular special thing with his team, but rather a host of little things that together made them really good.

He continued, “At Charlotte, there was not one thing that stood out that we thought, this is going to make us better. We put all the right pieces together and we had speed. So we knew if we put everything together, we would have the speed. That was the first sign that we had through the year.”

The 2023 Coca-Cola 600 was Ryan Blaney’s first win of the season. When he’d conquered that chequered flag, he had made sure to send a message across the grid that he was in this for the win. But unfortunately, what followed was a dry run that neither the driver nor the crew chief could have anticipated.

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Continuing to talk about the signs that he had, Hassler credited Ryan Blaney’s performance at Kansas in the second race of the playoffs. He’d finished P12 in it. Talking about how they’d been really good on short runs in the race, he said, “Honestly, I look back at Kansas and we had a really really good short run at speed in that race. We really struggled, with long-run speed but we kinda were able to massage what we did there and carry it into the rest of the playoffs.”

Keeping apart the occasional brilliance that the #12 team displayed, their season is ordained by just 3 victory lane visits. It is the timing and cruciality of these wins that mattered at the end of the day in the championship run. Talking about how the midseason performances, in which Blaney went through a winless dry run, were more of a learning experience, Hassler said, “We spent the whole year trying to figure out where we are at. (…) Once we got the win at Charlotte, we kind of stretched a little bit more and tried to learn a bit more so that once the playoffs came around, we could put together the things that were working.”

End of the day, all the little things did end up stacking together like Hassler had expected. Through their combined effort, the #12 team gave Roger Penske his 2nd championship in as many years. Hopefully, they will be able to display their 2022 consistency along with their 2023 speed in the coming season.

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