Todd Gilliland turned a mid-pack run into a seven-figure payday Sunday, beating Ryan Blaney in the Brickyard 400 to win NASCAR's $1 million In-Season Challenge. Gilliland finished 24th, Blaney 26th, and that was enough to settle the championship.
Gilliland entered the event as the 25th of 32 qualifiers, then kept surviving round after round by finishing higher than Daniel Suarez, Carson Hocevar, Alex Bowman and Chase Elliott. The path was narrow from the start, but the prize at the end was real: $1 million for Gilliland and Front Row Motorsports.
Blaney had gone into the final as the No. 3 seed and looked set up for a deep run after winning at Atlanta Motor Speedway in the quarterfinal round. The bracket rewarded that kind of finish with a stronger position, which made Gilliland's climb from 25th even more difficult on paper. But the race itself did not follow the script.
The turning point came on a Lap 120 restart, when Blaney was spun into the wall between Turns 3 and 4 after contact with John Hunter Nemechek. His No. 12 Team Penske Ford picked up splitter damage, and after a lengthy pit stop for repairs he rejoined in 31st. From there, he never recovered enough to catch Gilliland before the checkered flag.
That was the part Gilliland sounded most aware of afterward. He called it nerve wracking and said the field had barely squeezed by every round, but added that the group did what it needed to do. The part that makes the result stand out is not just the money. Gilliland never finished better than eighth en route to the title, yet still left Indianapolis as the second winner of the In-Season Challenge.
He said the victory was something to celebrate and that the team would figure out something to do with the $1 million. For Gilliland, the prize is done. The bigger question now is how Front Row Motorsports turns the kind of upset that won by inches into something that lasts beyond one Sunday.
