Suddenly It seems, Joey Logano is right back in it.
After spending much of the first half of the 2026 NASCAR Cup season looking rather more like a man waiting for his Uber than a championship contender, the Team Penske driver has apparently remembered where the gas pedal is.
Logano won for the second time in four races Saturday night at Richmond Raceway, and unlike his victory at North Wilkesboro a few weeks ago, this one required him to work for it right down to the end.
He took the lead for the final time with 24 laps remaining and then had to thread his way through traffic while keeping Chase Briscoe behind him and, more importantly, hoping NASCAR would resist the temptation to throw a fifth caution on the night.
In the end there wasn’t, and he did. Logano crossed the finish line just 0.392 seconds ahead of Briscoe for his third Richmond victory, ending a 108-lap green-flag run that was the longest of the night.
And after a season in which the No. 22 team has occasionally looked like it was trying to find its own keys, Logano had a simple message for his crew over the radio.
“We’re on it now, boys.”
Well, yes. It appears they are.
The Richmond race was the sort of strategic lunacy that makes the place so much fun. With teams needing to pit roughly every 40 laps, there were the usual factions: those who pitted when they were supposed to, those who stretched the fuel window and those who apparently decided that the best strategy was to simply do something different and hope the yellow flag made them look like geniuses.
The varying strategies created a particularly entertaining situation for cars that had fallen a lap down after pitting. On fresh tires, they were sometimes as much as two seconds per lap quicker than the leaders on older rubber, allowing them to blast through traffic and demonstrate just how much speed a new set of Goodyears could buy.
Logano, however, was not one of the strategic outliers.
Neither was Briscoe, who came painfully close to turning a miserable Richmond history into one of the biggest feel-good stories of the night.
The Stewart-Haas Racing refugee turned Joe Gibbs Racing star, had never led a lap in nine previous Cup series Richmond starts and had never finished in the top 10. Saturday night, he led the most laps and finished second.
Naturally, he was not exactly thrilled about the last part.
“One bad run,” Briscoe said. “That was the difference maker there in the end. It’s weird to be running second here. This has been a real struggle to me, this place. I think that’s my first ever top 10 here even. To get close, not get it done is so frustrating.”
Welcome to Richmond, Chase. The place has a charming way of kicking you in the shins just when you think you’ve figured it out.
Austin Cindric finished third, followed by Denny Hamlin and Chase Elliott.
For much of the early evening, however, it looked as though Team Penske might simply be conducting a private test session with everyone else invited solely to watch.
Ryan Blaney started from the pole and needed nine laps to finally shake Briscoe loose from a side-by-side fight for the lead. Once he did, Blaney opened a gap and appeared to have things nicely under control.
The first round of green-flag stops began before the halfway point of Stage 1, but Blaney cycled back into the lead on Lap 37. Last week’s winner at Iowa Ty Gibbs, meanwhile, managed to turn a good starting position into a bad one by getting nailed for speeding and being sent to the back.
Briscoe mounted a late charge, but Blaney held him off to win the opening stage. Logano finished second.
Stage 2 started with Briscoe getting around Blaney, although Blaney eventually worked his way back to the front on Lap 107.
Then Zane Smith decided Turn 2 was a perfectly good place to go for a spin.
His Lap 125 incident brought out the second caution and scrambled the carefully constructed pit strategies. Briscoe was in the process of sliding past Blaney as Blaney slowed for his green-flag stop, so the yellow essentially handed the leaders a free reset.
Briscoe won the race off pit road, followed by Logano and Blaney.
The green flag flew on Lap 132, and whatever magic Blaney had found in Stage 1 appeared to have gone missing. Hamlin muscled his way past him for third, and Blaney soon found himself hanging on in fifth.
Logano, meanwhile, was doing what Logano does when given a good race car: making everyone else’s life increasingly irritating.
He grabbed the lead during another cycle of green-flag stops on Lap 172, made his own stop on Lap 179 and had cycled back ahead of Briscoe by Lap 182.
Behind him, Kyle Larson was trying to rewrite the rules of mathematics.
Larson had been buried deep in the field and made a second pit stop while much of the lead group committed to running the final 40 laps of the stage on one set of tires. The fresh rubber turned Larson into a missile, allowing him to carve through the field in an attempt to get back onto the lead lap.
He couldn’t quite make it.
But he did become the first car one lap down, which was another demonstration of just how enormous the tire advantage could be.
Up front, Logano simply disappeared.
He won Stage 2 by eight seconds, with Hamlin slipping past Briscoe late to take second.
Then came the final stage, and Briscoe immediately decided he had seen quite enough of Logano’s rear bumper.
Logano led the field off pit road, but Briscoe took the lead when the green flag waved.
Once again, the pit-cycle dance began. Logano stopped on Lap 277, with Briscoe following a lap later.
Tyler Reddick, who had spent much of the evening looking like he would rather be somewhere else, was trying to stretch the strategy. He eventually became the last car on the lead lap and, for a brief moment, the leader.
Then Carson Hocevar mis-shifted on Lap 285 and came to a stop.
Caution.
For Reddick, it was almost divine intervention.
Briscoe and Logano had just pitted and stayed out, while Reddick and Hamlin came in. When the green flag returned on Lap 292, Reddick restarted ninth and Hamlin 10th.
Reddick apparently decided that if he was going to salvage the evening, he might as well do it with the subtlety of a shopping cart rolling downhill.
He bounced off cars, got involved in a three- and four-wide fight and somehow emerged in third by Lap 296, behind Briscoe and Logano.
It was a brief glimpse of the chaos lurking beneath Richmond’s strategy game.
But out front, Logano had the car and the position he needed.
Briscoe kept him honest. The No. 19 was actually faster during the final run, forcing Logano to manage his tires rather than simply drive away.
“The 19 was better than us that last run,” Logano admitted. “I was trying to just manage the tires, able to get that gap.”
That gap turned out to be just large enough.
Asked afterward whether the team was now a legitimate championship threat, Logano didn’t exactly duck the question.
“I think so. We got a strong team, no doubt,” he said. “Obviously (crew chief) Paul (Wolfe) made some great calls there. … Yeah, it was a fun back-and-forth battle. Fun strategy with different strategies out there. Typical Richmond race.”
More importantly, Logano has finally given himself something he badly needed: momentum.
He entered Richmond outside the top 10 in points. The victory moves him to ninth, exactly where he wanted to be as the Chase picture begins to take shape.
“I think this gets us close,” Logano said. “We need to get ourselves back in the top 10.”
Turns out he didn’t just get close.
He got there.
And now, after a relatively quiet first half of the season, Joey Logano has won two of the last four races and suddenly looks like a man who has remembered that he is a three time champion looking to add another.
“Don’t let the boys get hot,” he joked when asked if he believed the team could get on a roll.
Too late, Joey.
The boys appear to be getting hot.
Next stop is New Hampshire Motor Speedway, where NASCAR returns to Sunday afternoon racing.
Logano, meanwhile, isn’t planning on slowing down.
“Yeah, on to Loudon and get another one.”
Suddenly, that doesn’t sound quite as ridiculous as it did a few weeks ago.
RACE RESULTS
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.
- Everyone can stop ignoring Joey Logano now - August 15, 2026
- Noah Gragson’s NASCAR career gets another lease on life - August 14, 2026
- Ty Gibbs won, but JGR’s real story was behind him - August 9, 2026