Team Penske has won only one race so far in the NASCAR Cup playoffs, which came on Sunday via Ryan Blaney. That’s just one victory so far in the 10-race postseason. But according to Chris Gabehart, competition director for Joe Gibbs Racing and former crew chief for Denny Hamlin, Blaney’s victory could be the start of yet another Team Penske run toward a fourth consecutive Cup championship.
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Joey Logano won the 2022 and last season’s Cup championships, while Blaney won the 2023 Cup crown. If you include Logano’s first Cup championship in 2018, Team Penske has won four of the last seven Cup crowns. No other team has come close to the Penske drivers in terms of playoff success. For the record, Hendrick Motorsports won in 2020 and 2021, while JGR won in 2019.
If no team – particularly Gabehart’s own JGR organization – doesn’t get a handle on Logano, Blaney, and Austin Cindric (provided he advances to the Round of 8; he’s currently 19 points below the cutline), Gabehart believes Team Penske could very well be “untouchable” in the final four races of the playoffs.
Those races would be the three Round of 8 events – Las Vegas, Talladega, and Martinsville – and the Championship 4 season finale for the final time this year at Phoenix Raceway.
Sunday, the Ford-powered Team Penske/Wood Brothers Racing affiliation was nothing short of a juggernaut, capturing three of the top four spots: Blaney won, the Wood Brothers’ Josh Berry was a surprising second (one week after he was eliminated from the playoffs at Bristol), and Logano was fourth.
With the win, Blaney moved up four places to take over the lead in the Cup points standings, while Logano also jumped four spots to sixth place, a solid 24 points above the provisional Round of 8 cutoff line.
The other Team Penske driver, Austin Cindric, finished 17th and finds himself in trouble heading into the middle race of the Round of 12, 19 points below the cutline.
Could Phoenix be a repeat of Loudon for Team Penske?
Since the championship-deciding track at Phoenix is very similar to Loudon (both are one-mile flat tracks), Gabehart believes that what worked well for Team Penske on Sunday could also work well at Phoenix and result in yet another Team Penske Cup championship.
“The biggest thing you have to take away from today, with this aero package and the same tires at Phoenix and a one-mile raceway, the Penske cars are completely untouchable again,” Gabehart said.
“I know what it’s like to be untouchable. We’ve been fortunate enough to be on the right side of that, but the reality is we have a lot of work to do with this package. And that’s the focus. The rest of it is just noise. We have to get better,” he added.
In a sense, it’s kind of hard to figure out how JGR has to get better when the Toyota-powered team swept all three races in the Round of 16 opening round. Chase Briscoe won the playoff opener at Darlington, Denny Hamlin won at Gateway, and Christopher Bell reached Victory Lane at Bristol.
But at Loudon, there was a chink in JGR’s armor: Bell finished sixth, Briscoe was 10th, and Hamlin wound up 12th.
To see Gabehart’s long face afterward was telling indeed. For as good as JGR was in the Round of 16, those races are now history. Now, JGR must grab the bull by the horns in the next two races in the Round of 12, lest Team Penske grabs the jugular in the Round of 8 and the Championship 4 races.
Gabehart also begrudgingly admitted that in a July tire test at Loudon, Logano was by far the fastest, which likely helped contribute to him taking the pole this weekend. Bell was the second-fastest among those who took part in the mid-summer test.
Gabehart isn’t giving it to Penske yet
But at the same time, Gabehart is trying not to let himself get too down, too early. He feels that if the championship race at Phoenix comes down to a shootout between Team Penske and JGR, his organization may still have a shot at earning its first Cup crown since Martin Truex Jr. in 2019.
“While this is the same aero package and the tire we’ll run at Phoenix, this isn’t Phoenix, it’s Loudon, and they have different racetracks, tendencies, and they were on the other side of the racetrack when we finished the race, and we finished first [earlier this year when Christopher Bell capped off a three-race winning streak],” said Gabehart.
“You can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater here, but the reality is it’s playoff season and here come the yellow cars with sub-par metrics along the way, but man, those guys know how to get it done when it counts. We’ll just have to race them the rest of the year and see how it goes,” he added.
But there’s no denying that for the last three seasons, the start of the second round has also been the start of “go time” for Team Penske. They’ve kicked things really into high gear at that stage, and eventually wound up with championships.
