WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. — Three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Joey Logano has seen this story before. The No. 22 Team Penske bunch has been through the ringer multiple times, only to come out the other side stronger.
But with three consecutive finishes of 30th or worse, Logano is coming off the worst three-race swings of his future first-ballot Hall of Fame career. It’s the first time he’s hit those numbers since two months into his rookie Cup season in 2009 while competing for Joe Gibbs Racing.
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“It’s not far off of where we’ve been in the past,” Logano said on Saturday at Watkins Glen International, fresh off qualifying sixth for Sunday’s Go Bowling at The Glen (3 p.m. ET, FS1, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). “I don’t think we’ve had a stretch of races this tough, though. This is probably a little more extreme than we’ve had.”
The rough patch began with a 30th-place effort last month at Kansas Speedway. He was near the front of the lead draft the next weekend at Talladega Superspeedway before getting collected in a 26-car melee. Last week at Texas Motor Speedway, his race was cut short just after the one-third mark, drilling Cole Custer’s No. 41 car on pit road.
Since finishing seventh at Bristol Motor Speedway, Logano has collected 17 points combined in the last three events, sinking to 17th on the outside of The Chase grid, seven points below Chase Briscoe for the final postseason ticket.
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“You just keep grinding. What are you supposed to do? You can’t quit,” Logano said when discussing his mindset moving forward. “You’ve got to keep pushing through. It’s a long season, a long way to go. Yeah, it’s been tough — I can’t hide from that. It’s frustrating; it’s hard. I’ve also been here before.
“This is where the tough get going. It is what it is, you have to keep figuring things out and figure out how to be better and get ourselves back where we need to be in points.”
There is room for optimism. During Logano’s most recent championship surge in 2024, he fell as low as 17th in the regular-season championship standings after the Coca-Cola 600 on Memorial Day Weekend.
However, the new championship format rewards consistency. Logano holds an average finish of 21.0 — on pace to be the worst of his Cup career — through the first 11 races, best enough for 22nd of the 36 Cup competitors. It ranks worst of the Penske trio (Ryan Blaney 13.1; Austin Cindric 19.0) and below fellow Ford drivers Chris Buescher (11.3), Brad Keselowski (13.3), Ryan Preece (13.8) and Zane Smith (20.1). Logano is looking to end a 36-race winless streak, dating back to the first weekend of May in 2025 at Texas.
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Logano isn’t dwelling on any negativity. He knows the capability of the No. 22 team, led by three-time championship-winning crew chief Paul Wolfe. And before wrecking on pit road at Texas, he saw some of that potential rise as he was driving through the field on a treacherous intermediate.
Said Logano: “I look at Texas before we got in that pit-road wreck — speed was there, car was fast, arguably the fastest car that last run as we were trying to get our way through the field. I felt good about that. There are some positives to take out of all those things. So you look at that, learn from the mistakes, and you move on.”
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Another positive was Logano’s sixth-place qualifying effort for Watkins Glen. For the last number of seasons, road courses were among Penske’s weakest spots. On Sunday, all three entries will take the green flag from inside the top 10, with Cindric leading the charge in third place.
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The 2015 Watkins Glen winner has only three top 10s in the last nine visits to the Finger Lakes region. But early track position could set the No. 22 team up well and bank immediate stage points.
“We were in that mode anyways,” Logano said. “You have to look at any of these races these days like, ‘OK, how do you maximize your day?’ Is that by finishing well or creating the most points possible? Sometimes, that means giving up a stage to get the most points possible just depending on where you’re at.”
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