Ryan Blaney's radio features multiple people talking, but an unexpected voice popped up during last weekend's Cup Series race at Bristol Motor Speedway. Instead of his crew chief, spotter, or team owner, Blaney heard his nephew.
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"Hi, Uncle Ryan," Blaney heard over the radio. "Win this race."
The 2023 Cup Series champion waited a beat, and then he delivered a message while chuckling.
"Get Bodhi off the scanner," He said. "He found (wife) Gianna's scanner in the bus and found out how to turn it on. Pretty smart."
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The moment occurred with 187 laps remaining in what had been a fairly chaotic elimination race where tires corded much faster than expected and fires erupted in multiple Ford Mustangs.
While Blaney didn't exactly want to hear his nephew Bodhi on the radio, he also recognized how it helped lighten the mood.
"It was a point in the race where there were a lot of cautions after cautions, so that was a nice moment of levity of just a little break," Blaney told media members on Tuesday.
How exactly did a 4-year-old gain access to Blaney's radio so that he could reach out to his uncle? It all happened with an innocent conversation on race day.
"The 4-year-old was talking to me before the race," Blaney explained. "He's like, 'What's that thing with Aunt Gianna's name on it?' I was like, 'It's a radio to where Aunt Gianna can listen to my racing.' And he was like, 'Oh, like a walkie-talkie.' I was like, 'Yeah, kind of like a walkie-talkie,' so I guess he took that and remembered it. He's a smart kid.
"He figured it out and turned it on and pushed the button and gave me a little bit of motivation. That was pretty cool. It was at a great time. It was under caution. There was not much going on and I got a real good kick out of it. We all did. All of my team got a good kick out of it, so that was funny, and I knew right away who it was.
"When he called me Uncle Ryan I was like, 'Alright, that's either Bodhi or Louie, and I figured it was Bodhi, the younger one, because I talked to him about this radio, so I got a good laugh out of that."
The story was not yet over. Blaney did not actually know that the radio's talk button worked. He and Gianna thought the radio had an obsolete button that would not do anything when pushed.
Turns out, they were incorrect, which his nephew proved the moment Blaney's mother turned her back on the youngsters.
"My mother was mortified because she was with them," he said. "She turned around to microwave something for two seconds and they somehow got the radio.
"But I think that was the first time I was genuinely shocked of hearing a certain human being's voice on the radio."
The Team Penske driver does not expect this to happen in the future; after all, he said they will get the button worked on so that no one can push it accidentally.
But this moment will live on for years to come thanks to NASCAR's in-car cameras and scanners.
