Team Penske drivers have a knack for coming alive when the playoffs roll around. Joey Logano, for one, has made a habit of doing just enough in the regular season, winning a single race each year to punch his playoff ticket, before turning up the heat in the final stretch to capture two championships in the last three seasons. In fact, his 2024 title run came with the worst average finish ever for a Cup champion at 17.1. This year, sitting on a 15.8 average, Logano once again enters the Martinsville decider in a cornered position needing a familiar result.
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Ahead of the finale race of the round at Martinsville, where he sits sixth in the Round of 8 standings and 38 points below the cutline, Logano cut straight to the point.
“The playoffs are tough, and we’re in this position that we’re in because we didn’t do good enough during the regular season. That’s the bottom line. If we had 30-plus more playoff points, which some had, we’d be sitting there saying, ‘Boy, we could point our way in,’ even with having a mediocre first two races of the round. We’d still have a chance because all of those races matter.”
“But we didn’t have a really good regular season, so now we’re put in a spot to where we have to win. We’re not out. We still have a great chance, but we only have really one avenue of getting there. That’s the difference. That’s why we are where we are. It’s simple enough,” he continued.
Even the stats back him up. Over the past five seasons, Logano has consistently finished well at Martinsville’s Xfinity 500, ending the race inside the top five twice, in 2020 and 2023, and cracking the top 10 in the other three runs. With that record, and if he can stack good stage points along the way, a clutch performance on Sunday could still keep his championship hopes alive.
The Round of 8 finale pressure is ‘positive’ motivation for Logano
While most drivers and crews tend to crack under the weight of a season on the line, especially with one final shot at the Championship 4, Logano insists pressure has never been his undoing. For the No. 22 Team Penske driver, it fuels the fire. He thrives on it, using that edge as extra motivation to dig deeper when it counts most.
To Logano, pressure is the proving ground. And according to him, that kind of pressure, those things are all good. Some people might overdo it. Some people might let it get to them and make mistakes. He’s seen it countless times through the playoffs, how tension ripples through not just drivers but entire teams, from crew chiefs to tire changers, everyone feeling the heat.
That, Logano argues, is exactly why he’s such a fan of the current playoff format. It pushes every person in the garage to the brink and separates the ones who wilt from the ones who rise.
