Last weekend’s Cup Series race at Darlington Raceway was about as unlikely of a performance that Joey Logano and the No. 22 Team Penske team have ever managed. For the duration of 400 miles, the three-time champion raced outside the top 30 and finished a putrid 33rd, basically a no-show.
Logano bounced back in Sunday’s Cook Out 400 at Martinsville Speedway, matching his best performance of the season.
From the start of practice on Saturday at “The Paperclip,” it appeared as though Logano was going to be a major player. That’s common for the No. 22 team in the Commonwealth, as Logano entered with a streak of 13 consecutive top 10 finishes at Martinsville.
As soon as the green flag waved on Sunday, Logano progressed from a ninth-place qualifying effort. By the end of the opening stage, he leaped to seventh. At the end of the Second stage, he raced to third position, best-in-class behind the Joe Gibbs Racing duo of Denny Hamlin and Ty Gibbs.
“More short tracks, please,” Logano joked after the race. “It’s definitely our strength as a team.”
Indeed it is.
Penske is renowned as having arguably the best short-track program in the field. Logano’s teammates Ryan Blaney and Austin Cindric were in the mix throughout the race, also scoring stage points in both stages. As did Josh Berry, a quasi-Penske car through a technical alliance with Wood Brothers Racing.
Logano remained in the hunt for the duration of the event. While Hamlin was on Chase Elliott’s heels for the final stint, the No. 22 car chugged along in third. It equaled his best finish of the season – Daytona 500 – and the 46 points earned ties the most points he’s banked in a race this season.
“Solid rebound for everybody,” Logano told Fox Sports after the race. “It’s a track we expect to be good at when we come here. When you have weekends like last weekend, you start to question everything. You have to, as a competitor, you have to do that.
“We expected to have a good rebound. Our car, if we were able to get to the lead, I don’t know if [Elliott] was any better than us, he just got the clean air at the right time. If we were able to do that, we could have been in that position as well. Proud of the team’s effort to get stage points that we needed in both stages and a solid third place as well.”
With the superb showing, Logano jumped four positions in the regular-season championship standings, 18 points above the cutline. He entered the race in a three-way tie for the final spot.
“I feel like we have our heads wrapped more around these race tracks and that’s when you have to capitalize,” Logano stated. “You have to come out here and run top five when you have those types of tracks on the schedule and we have to keep working on the other ones.
“Not where we need to be yet, but that definitely felt nicer than last week.”
The series has its first of two off weeks throughout the 2026 season before returning to Bristol Motor Speedway on April 12. Logano is a two-time winner at the half-mile bullring, but had nine consecutive finishes outside the top 10 until he finished fifth last fall.