'The pressure's on us right now' says Logano

Joey Logano moved back into the NASCAR Cup Series win column on Sunday night at North Wilkesboro Speedway, but the job is not done.

Because a win no longer guarantees anything. Logano did move up two spots on the Chase grid, but he is not locked into the postseason. The three-time champion and his No. 22 team have been lingering around the bubble spot for much of the summer, and did what they do best at North Wilkesboro with a dominant performance to continue to keep themselves in contention.

“It’s one step at a time,” Logano said. “I always said this team doesn’t crack under pressure. That’s our biggest strength: we’re an even-keeled team. You just keep going along. Obviously, the pressure’s on us right now. This team usually excels in those situations, under pressure.

“We’ve seen that for years in the playoff system we’ve had. It really put us under that crazy amount of pressure for years. Our team’s gotten really good at that.”

Logano used a lone win in the regular season in 2023, 2024, and 2025 to earn his way into the postseason. Along the way, he became the poster child for critics of what is wrong with the win-and-win system, even though Logano and his team played by the rules and then excelled in the season’s final weeks to win championships in 2022 and 2024.

It has been more of the same this season as the team has struggled for consistency. Since the race in Las Vegas in March, Logano has moved up and down the standings between the 11th and 20th position.

“It’s for sure been different,” crew chief Paul Wolfe said of racing to the format. “With our struggles we’ve had, there’s a lot of DNFs in there as well, but when you get this far into the season, if you look at where guys are in the point standings, it ends up where typically they’ve been running. Unfortunately, we’ve been running around that position, that 16th, 17th, 18th, right where we are in the standings. Over time it works itself out.”

The team’s average finish is 18.9 and Sunday was only their third top-five finish on the season.

“Are we still a contender for a championship? I don’t know,” Wolfe said. “We still have a lot of work to do to get the other style racetracks where they need to be; the ones we’ve obviously struggled on this year. We know the short tracks are our strengths.”

There are five races remaining in the regular season. There are three – Iowa Speedway, Richmond Raceway, and New Hampshire Motor Speedway – that are less than one mile. Another is a superspeedway, Daytona International Speedway, where the Fords are always contenders given speed and teammate drafting.

It’s a stretch that Logano was confident about even before winning at Wilkesboro.

“This point of the season where we’re at, yeah, we’re in the crazy amount of pressure territory just to get in,” he said. “I like that. I like that our team excels in that. I think all of us do. A lot of that’s just because of the experience that we’ve been there, done that.

“Like I said, the pressure is still on. It’s not a comfortable situation. Still a long way from the ultimate goal.”