Ryan Blaney wins the 2022 Cup Series "All-Star Race" at Texas

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    Ryan Blaney won his first career NASCAR Cup Series "All-Star Race" on Sunday evening at Texas Motor Speedway, earning a $1 Million payday in the annual fan favorite non-points event. Interestingly, he and his team actually celebrated twice.

The No. 12 Ford Mustang narrowly beat Denny Hamlin in the No. 11 Toyota Camry by 0.266 seconds in an overtime finish. But at one point, Blaney thought he may have taken the checkered flag twice — a caution flag flew the first time he was approaching the finish line in regulation — only seconds before he crossed the line. 

He and his team thought he had won the race, not realizing the yellow light was on for an incident involving Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. on the backstretch. Moments after cruising across the finish line, Blaney unstrapped the driver’s side window netting preparing to celebrate the big win with his team, which was high-fiving one another and jumping onto pit road to applaud the apparent victory.

NASCAR, however, ruled with video evidence that the caution light had activated for the Stenhouse on-track incident, turning out to be a few yards before Blaney actually crossed the finish line.

As the cars made laps on the 1.5-mile track preparing for the overtime restart, Blaney could be seen trying to refasten the driver’s side safety net with one hand, steering the car under caution with the other. After finally getting the net secured, the race restarted and Blaney pulled away from the field going down the backstretch to take the checkered flag — the 26th different driver to win NASCAR‘s prestigious All-Star event. Blaney really got lucky to bounce back from the slight mistake.

“It was about to be real bad for us, I thought the race was over,” Blaney said. “Everyone thought the race was over. I already had my window net down. I do want to thank NASCAR for letting me kind of fix it and not make us come down pit road. But yeah, that was really tough. Then having to do it all over again after trying to get that window net back up there."

However, there were many other drivers to suffer because of mistakes and crashes throughout the evening, and not finish.

Kyle Busch was polesitter for the "All-Star Race" but had an incident after the end of Stage 1, which the No. 18 driver won. Busch had a tire go down and collected Ross Chastain and Chase Elliott. Kyle Larson, who was the defending winner of the "All-Star Race", also fell victim to tire failure. The Fan Vote winner Erik Jones also spun from tire failure, crashing into the wall and ending his day.

Here are the complete "All-Star Race" Results:

NASCAR.com

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