With a 24th-place finish, Front Row Motorsports’ Todd Gilliland held off Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney to win the 2026 NASCAR In-Season Challenge at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
The No. 34 driver — seeded 25th in the tournament — earns $1 million and bragging rights for surviving the five-week, 32-driver knockout bracket.
Gilliland earned a two-position victory after Blaney suffered damage in a Lap 120 crash.
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“My heart was pounding those last 25 laps,” Gilliland said in a post-race press conference. “Seemed like one slipup and I was going to be right in front of the 12 or right behind him even coming down to the very end.
“I still feel like we kind of earned it coming down the stretch. Yeah, I think I kind of talked about it before, but the biggest thing for me that was really cool through this whole process was seeing how my team really elevated themselves, really grabbed another gear. They worked super, super hard, long hours for this week, just really ramped up throughout this whole In-Season Challenge. I think it’s cool. They unlocked another level within themselves.”
Blaney, driver of the No. 12 Ford, led the fifth-year driver for most of the race. With 40 laps to go, he and John Hunter Nemechek made contact, resulting in a nine-car melee and damage to both ends of his car. Blaney came down pit road for repairs and restarted 30th on Lap 126.
“I was nose to tail with five other cars in front of me,” Gilliland explained of his thought process once Blaney spun. “I just see a little bit of yellow out of the right side of my eye. I was like, man, even if he just spins here, he’s going to be back in the pack. Obviously it’s pretty tough to pass once you get settled in. Then he hit the nose. I was like, All right, maybe that will slow him down a little bit. Maybe it did a little bit, but he was just as fast as us.
“It’s one of those things where you never cheer against someone. After it’s over with, you’re like, All right, that definitely helped us out. Now we definitely need to take advantage of it.”
Gilliland, who refired 15th, dropped significantly over the final stint of the race, and Blaney got within two spots of him. But Blaney got no higher than 26th the rest of the race, and Gilliland won by two spots.
Blaney, who had the No. 3 seed, had finished no worse than 11th through the first four In-Season Challenge races. He advanced to the Champions Round with relative ease, as each of his four previous matchups was decided by eight or more positions. Notably, Blaney earned a berth in the semifinal Round 4 with a rousing, 171-lap led victory into the night at EchoPark Speedway to knock out No. 11 seed William Byron. He defeated No. 10 seed Christopher Bell last Sunday at North Wilkesboro to secure a spot in the championship.
Ultimately, that dominating early effort went for naught, as he also snapped an eight-race top-10 streak and dropped 33 points to Denny Hamlin in the quest for the top seed in The Chase.
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“Not a fun day,” Blaney told TNT Sports after the race. “It’s a shame to end it that way; we’re just kind of scrapping along, and yeah, it stinks. I wanted to put together a good run today, just try to have a shot to run well here, a place we try to run really well at, and unfortunately, it didn’t go the way we wanted.
Gilliland had three top 20s during the event, including a banner eighth-place effort last week in an upset of Chase Elliott. Despite finishing 29th in the opener at Sonoma, he knocked out No. 8 seed Daniel Suárez before a 16th-place effort at Chicagoland propelled him past No. 9 seed Carson Hocevar — who suffered damage in an incident with Zane Smith. Gilliland benefited from a late-race crash at EchoPark to beat No. 32 seed Alex Bowman in Round 3, before setting up the Cinderella-like victories over two Cup champions in the final two rounds.
“When you’re the 25th seed looking up at that mountain of we have to beat this guy or this guy, it seems like a very tall task,” Gilliland said. “Even for myself, I never really thought this was a realistic goal. When you get a little bit closer, you go past one round, two rounds, then you’re in the final eight, final four, then the finale, it really ramps up a lot.
“It’s cool. I think you kind of saw that with my team in the shop and everywhere. I honestly feel like they were more into it at the very beginning. They were like, ‘C’mon, dude, we’re in this thing.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, there’s still a long ways to go, though.’ They definitely cared about it a ton from the very beginning.”
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Now up to 23rd in points with 14 races remaining this season — and a new contract in hand — Gilliland is hopeful this creates momentum beginning at Iowa (Aug. 9, 3:30 p.m. ET, USA Sports, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) after the off-week.
And he’d certainly like to see the In-Season Challenge return in 2027.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Realistically, it’s not going to be someone that is 23rd in points that makes a run through it. I think, obviously, we got super lucky along the way.
“We’re racing against the best of the best every single week. That’s the coolest thing. All of these guys are capable of so much. Hopefully I can do my job to the best of my ability and show them we can do that and close out the season strong.”