Analysis: At last, Joey Logano finds relief from playoff perplexities in Nashville win: 'That pressure is real'

Joey Logano had a feeling a turnaround day would come. Just two weeks ago at Iowa Speedway, he shared that his wife, Brittany, had reminded him about the doldrums that had haunted his 2018 season, which was hampered by an 11-race summer stretch without a top-five finish. By his own admission, Logano said he was “a pretty miserable person to be around” while his results sagged.

The bright-side part of the reminder: That season ended with the first of Logano’s two NASCAR Cup Series championships, spurred by a strong closing kick to the 10-race postseason. He acknowledged that Brittany was right, concluding, “I’m still optimistic that we’re going to figure things out.”

Two weeks later, both the reminder and the underlying optimism bore fruit in Logano’s fuel-sipping, strategy-heavy surge to victory in Sunday’s marathon Ally 400 at Nashville Superspeedway. The Team Penske veteran snapped a winless streak of 49 points-paying races, securing a Cup Series Playoffs ticket that was on shaky ground up until his No. 22 Ford stammered across the finish line with an almost-dry tank after five overtimes.

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The season so far has been an uneven ascent from early depths, with Logano sitting 30th in the Cup Series standings after what he called “definitely the toughest start of a season I’ve ever had,” just four races in. He had regained some of that lost ground before Sunday’s start but was only plus-13 in relation to the playoff elimination line as the last driver into the provisional 16-driver field before the green flag.

Three prongs of uncertainty stirred Logano’s Sunday angst — his playoff bubble residency, his fuel cell on fumes and the specter of a wild-card event looming in this weekend’s Chicago Street Race (Sunday, 4:30 p.m. ET, NBC, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App). Those factors also fed Logano’s relief and elation after making all of those unknowns go away.

“Oh, yeah. It felt like a superspeedway win to me because you don’t know until you get to the start/finish line. I went bonkers in the car,” Logano said, drawing comparisons to Talladega-level tension. “You think about this playoff scenario that we were in, being on that cutoff spot, man, it sucks. It’s not fun. That pressure is real, and you don’t sleep good. You’re constantly thinking about it. It’s nice to be able to get this win to where you can take the next seven weeks to be able to — not take a breather but be able to at least sleep a little bit and start thinking about the playoffs as much as the next few races.

“When you think about Chicago coming up next week and you’re on the cutoff spot, not a comfortable spot to be. Just the timing of this one couldn’t have been better.”

Team Penske’s Cup Series operation is sleeping better across the board, with all three of its full-time drivers breaking into the win column in June. Austin Cindric added the first part of that collective playoff-picture exhale five weeks ago at World Wide Technology Raceway, and Ryan Blaney gave his Cup Series title defense a springboard at Iowa. Logano’s effort at Nashville was the organization’s last missing piece.

The timing for the rest of the playoff-hopeful field is less savory. Logano’s promotion as the 11th driver into the postseason bracket moved the tentative elimination line, with Alex Bowman slotting into the new last-driver-in spot and Bubba Wallace still the first driver out. That gap, however, has widened to a 51-point divide, raising the likely price of admission to a regular-season victory in the next seven races before the playoffs grid is determined.

It’s a desperation spot that’s shared by Chase Briscoe, 78 points back in Stewart-Haas Racing’s swan-song campaign, and the luckless Kyle Busch, who has sunk to an improbable 104 points off the elimination line after four DNFs in the last five races for his No. 8 Richard Childress Racing group. A host of hungry drivers further back in the standings are poised to take home-run cuts to clinch one of the five remaining spots; such a victory would shuffle the playoff deck even more.

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An aggressive, against-the-odds fuel gamble to the finish helped Logano and the No. 22 group emerge from that postseason pickle. Crew chief Paul Wolfe noted post-race how the opportunities hadn’t materialized as hoped in recent weeks at Gateway, Iowa and New Hampshire Motor Speedway — all areas of focus — but that the No. 22 team had made the progress necessary to capitalize when needed. Converting before an odd lot of tracks in the next three weeks — Chicago Street, Pocono, Indianapolis — was crucial, but the emphasis didn’t stray from returning to Victory Lane.

Whether this season ends in the same way that 2018 did for Logano & Co. is still up for grabs, but Sunday’s win at least puts the former champ back in the picture.

“I think myself and one of my engineers has kind of been of the mindset that hey, we’re going to have to win a race,” Wolfe said. “As much as you want to say you can point your way in, that’s great, but I think personally we’ve been in the mindset we need to win, like I said, and I kind of told Joey coming into this last stretch of four or five races. …

“So this is good, and now it gives us the opportunity to continue to build.”