Tale of Two Seasons: Ford Performance Experiencing Incredible Resurgence in Cup Series

Admit it, you were worried about Ford Performance in the NASCAR Cup Series, weren't you? You're not alone. I too, thought things were heading toward a disastrous debut season for the manufacturer's Ford Mustang Dark Horse car and branding.

Over the opening 12 weeks of the season, while Chevrolet and Toyota were busy stacking wins, it became increasingly clearer with each passing week that Ford was a step behind. But then, something strange happened. They turned it all around. And they've done it in a big, big way in recent weeks.

While he didn't have the dominant car for the majority of Sunday's NASCAR Cup Series The Great American Getaway 400 at Pocono Raceway, Ryan Blaney found himself at the front of the field in a mixture of strategy, a fast car, and good pit work by his No. 12 team, oh, and poor execution by others including Kyle Larson and Chase Elliott, who were flagged for speeding on pit road on the day's last pit stop.

Larson won the race off pit road ahead of Blaney, while Elliott was slated to restart third. After the penalties, Blaney inherited the lead with 44 laps to go and was tasked with holding off Denny Hamlin, a seven-time NASCAR Cup Series race winner at Pocono.

It wasn't an easy task, but Blaney did just that, and now the defending NASCAR Cup Series champion has two wins on the year.

With the win, Team Penske has snagged wins in four of the last seven races. They're literally winning every other race, currently. And Ford Performance, who was 0-for-12 to start the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season, has now won five of the last nine races. Blaney says that the speed in his Ford Mustang Dark Horses has been spectacular over the last two months.

"Yeah, I mean, I feel like the last two months we’ve been spectacular," Blaney said in his post-race press conference. "Speed in our cars has been great. A couple finishes might not reflect that. It’s really none of our doing. Gateway we had a great shot to win, didn’t really work out. New Hampshire, had a great run, got spun out. I am really feeling good about the speed in our cars right now across the board at Team Penske. I feel like we’ve found a lot of stuff."

While Blaney feels his Team Penske organization has really found something with its cars, you can't deny it with the recent run they are on, but the Ford turnaround started with Brad Keselowski's win at Darlington Raceway, a race that his RFK Racing teammate Chris Buescher had sewed up before late-race contact with Tyler Reddick eliminated both drivers from contention.

Two Fords were running inside the top three at Darlington Raceway, and one of them finally broke through for the blue oval.

In the team victory celebration at the RFK Racing shop following the win at Darlington, Keselowski toasted a group from Ford Performance, who he credited with recent upgrades to the new Ford Mustang Dark Horse race car, which he says allowed he and his team to come to life, and be in a position to win at Darlington.

Keselowski would follow his win up with a runner-up finish in the Coca-Cola 600, the next points-paying race after Darlington.

While RFK Racing was excelling with the new Ford upgrades, Team Penske was still trying to wrap their heads around it. Joey Logano was the highest-finishing Penske driver in the Coca-Cola 600 in 14th. But seeing RFK Racing's success in the Ford Mustang Dark Horse allowed the Team Penske organization to know the speed was there with the car, they just needed to find it. So, they went to work.

"Gosh, we’ve done our homework since Charlotte and figured out how to compete with the Hendrick boys and the Gibbs guys, 23XI," Blaney stated on Sunday evening. "We’re right there."

He's not wrong, at all.

In a two-month span, Ford has awoken from its slumber and is now going toe-to-toe with the other big dogs in the sport. It's not a coincidence that the turnaround coincided with the aforementioned upgrades to the Mustang Dark Horse from Ford.

Since Darlington in May, Ford has sliced 25 points out of Chevrolet's manufacturer standings point lead, and over the last nine races, Ford has scored the most manufacturer points of any OEM. And it hasn't been close. Ford has racked up 338 manufacturer points to Toyota's 316, and Chevrolet's 313 since Darlington.

With 15 races remaining in the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season, Ford sits 25 points behind Chevrolet, and 15 points behind Toyota in the Manufacturer Standings, but with the incredible run Ford has been on with Team Penske and RFK Racing clicking off top-two finishes left and right, Ford winning the Manufacturer's title, which seemed like an impossible task a couple of months ago, is now a very real scenario.

The Ford Mustang Dark Horse was designed from the ground up to dominate in the NASCAR Cup Series. And nearly at the 2/3's mark of the season, it's beginning to do just that.

It just took the manufacturer, and its race teams a little bit of time to understand the intricacies of its new body style and to get some real-world data to be able to begin crafting fixes, and upgrades to put teams like RFK Racing, Team Penske, Front Row Motorsports, Stewart-Haas Racing, and even Rick Ware Racing, which has had some phenomenal runs lately with Justin Haley, in a better place to succeed.

Photo Credit: David Rosenblum, NKP for Ford Performance