Blaneys to do battle in Sharon SRX

The 2022 Superstar Racing Experience season will end with a duel between father and son. On Monday, the series announced Dave Blaney and son Ryan will race in the final race of the year at Sharon Speedway on 23 July. Dave will be in the #10 while Ryan is the #12’s driver.

The duo are deeply embedded into the dirt and NASCAR world. In the latter, Dave was a Cup Series regular from 2000 to 2014; despite being relegated to start-and-park and backmarker roles for much of his career, he has twenty-eight top tens and a pair of poles. Dave won his lone NASCAR national series race in the now-Xfinity Series at Charlotte in 2006.

While Dave’s NASCAR tenure didn’t result in substantial success, Ryan is one of the Cup Series’ top young guns with seven wins to his name and playoff berths every year since 2017. In 2021, he won three races en route to a seventh-place points finish.

In 2013, the two raced as team-mates at Brad Keselowski Racing for the Camping World Truck Series race at Eldora Speedway, the first NASCAR national series dirt race since 1970. Dave finished ahead of Ryan with a ninth to Ryan’s fifteenth. Eldora is owned by SRX founder and inaugural champion Tony Stewart, though it will not return for the 2022 schedule after Stewart won there the previous year.

A three-eighth-mile dirt oval, Sharon Speedway is co-owned by the older Blaney, who took over operations in 2002 alongside a contingent of local business owners from the Weller and Kirila families. When the Hartford, Ohio circuit was announced as an SRX stop in February, both Blaneys were virtually expected to make guest appearances in the race. Ryan will be in for a busy weekend as the race takes place the day before the Cup Series runs at Pocono; qualifying is on the same day as SRX, but the latter being a night event could buy travel time.

The Blaneys are the second father/son pair to race in SRX, let alone against each other. The 2021 season finale at the Nashville Fairgrounds saw Bill and Chase Elliott do the same, though Bill was already running the full schedule, with Chase winning.