There is a question every champion eventually has to answer, and Joey Logano has spent the better part of two seasons sitting with it. When the wins stop coming and the resume on the wall starts to feel like a different person’s life, do you trust what you have already done, or do you tear it all up and start again? For a three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion enduring the worst stretch of his career, the answer has turned out to be neither, and both.
Logano has not won since May 4, 2025, at Texas. Through 15 starts this year he has just five top-10 finishes and a pair of top-fives, at Daytona and Martinsville, numbers that would be respectable for a journeyman and are jarring for the driver of the Team Penske No. 22. There have been weekends where the car rolled off the hauler unable to practice or qualify inside the top 25. There was a clumsy crash into the back of Cole Custer on pit road at Texas. And there has been the ordinary, grinding bad luck that turns a recoverable day into a wasted one.
A slump that does not fit the driver
What makes this season strange is that none of the usual explanations apply. Logano is 36 years old, squarely in what most people inside the garage consider a driver’s prime. He is not winding down. He is not in inferior equipment, at least not on paper, driving for one of the sport’s three superpowers. He remains paired with Paul Wolfe, the crew chief who engineered two of his championships and who has 43 Cup wins across his stints with Brad Keselowski and Logano. Two future Hall of Famers, in other words, looking at a season that makes no sense to either of them.
The temptation in that situation is to rest on what you know. Logano has thought hard about the trap that represents. “If you rest on your past, you’ll be stuck in your past because the facts are, everyone’s evolving, everyone’s getting better, so you have to keep evolving,” he said. “You have to look for new ways to do things, whether it’s processes, or the cars, whatever it may be. We got to think outside the box a little bit to find some direction.”
The resume is the part that makes the present so jarring. Logano arrived in the Cup Series in 2009 as a teenager carrying the nickname “Sliced Bread,” a label so heavy it nearly buried him before his career found its footing. He rebuilt himself at Penske and turned into one of the most clutch closers of his generation, winning the title in 2018, again in 2022, and a third time in 2024 to join an exclusive group of three-time champions. More than 30 career victories, two Daytona 500 appearances in Victory Lane conversations, a reputation for peaking when the playoffs arrive. Drivers with that record do not usually spend a summer wondering where the speed went. That is precisely why this stretch has drawn so much attention inside the garage.
Two champions refusing to point fingers
The easy thing for a driver and a crew chief in a slump is to start blaming each other. Logano says the opposite has happened, and that the shared history is exactly what holds the partnership together when the results do not. “What makes it easier is the fact that we can look at each other and say, okay, we’ve both won three championships and we know how to do this,” he said. “We’ve both won 30-whatever races, right? We know how to win. We just have to find a new way of doing it and figure out how to get there.”
Then came the line that revealed how he is keeping his head above water. “If we had never won before, we would be pretty down, but we believe in ourselves and have confidence. We just have to stick together.” It is the voice of a man using his past not as a place to hide but as proof that the present is survivable.
The struggle is not Logano’s alone. Both Ford and Penske have wrestled with form this season, and the No. 22 sits 17th in points, only three clear of teammate Austin Cindric. Josh Berry, in Ford’s wider orbit, learned this stretch that he would not return to Wood Brothers Racing while mired 30th in the standings. The context does not excuse the slump, but it places it inside a broader picture that Logano has been careful to acknowledge.
The Blaney problem
The most uncomfortable comparison sits in the same building. Ryan Blaney, in equipment Logano describes as identical, is third in the championship. Logano has not tried to spin that away. If anything, he has been generous to the point of self-deprecation about his teammate’s level.
“I’ll be real with you, Ryan Blaney is an incredible race car driver. He’s probably the best driver on the racetrack in my opinion,” Logano said. “He’s always been really, really fast and that’s not a surprise, but now he puts whole races together consistently, when he wasn’t always able to do that before. So now he does that and he’s really, really good. His way is different, but we have to figure out how to close the gap or figure out my way of doing it.”
There is no ego in that answer, only a problem to be solved. “It’s an open notebook,” he said of the Penske operation. “We all look at each other’s stuff. We’ve all tried every set-up approach we could try at this point. We just want to win. We don’t care if it’s my way, his way, or what the 12 is doing. We just have to figure out the combination that works for me.”
Still in it, barely
Logano is realistic about the format he is fighting against. The playoff system does not let him simply win his way to safety the way an old points structure might have. Even a strong rally to 10th in the regular season would leave him starting the Chase well behind the drivers setting the pace. He knows the arithmetic does not support a fourth title. He also refuses to file the year away as lost.
“This isn’t a limbo year or something like that, so don’t take it that direction,” he said. “We are still trying to get the most out of this thing, and there are years where we have turned it around quickly.” He leaned on a familiar memory to explain the belief. “Every year we won the championship, around this time of year, I tell my wife that I just hope to make the playoffs, and then we pop right back into place. There’s still a chance.”
That is the heart of it. Logano is not pretending the season has gone to plan, and he is not insulting anyone’s intelligence by promising a turnaround he cannot guarantee. He is doing the harder thing, which is to keep showing up, keep adjusting, and keep believing that the driver who has three Bill France Cups at home has not forgotten how he earned them. The recent run of finishes, an eighth at Charlotte, a seventh at Michigan, a sixth-place qualifying effort at Watkins Glen, suggests the No. 22 is at least pointing in the right direction again.
For the wider state of the title race Logano is chasing back into, see our breakdown of how the In-Season Challenge bracket shook out.
“We’re down but we are not out,” Logano said. “This team is pretty resilient. We keep grinding.” For a driver whose career has been defined by finding another gear when it counts, that grinding may yet be the most important work he does all year.
Sources:
- https://www.motorsport.com/nascar-cup/news/joey-logano-resilient-focused-amidst-worst-nascar-slump-/10829270/
- https://www.nascar.com/news/nascar-cup-series/
