For most of the NASCAR Playoffs, Team Penske looked like it had the golden ticket. Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney—the modern-day odd couple of speed and strategy—were running like the championship would once again come down to whichever one of them didn’t blink first in Phoenix. Then Talladega happened.
And what a circus it was. The place where anything can happen—and usually does—turned into the kind of bad dream that makes crew chiefs wake up in a cold sweat clutching their headsets. Austin Cindric had already been shown the door weeks ago, but Logano and Blaney arrived in Alabama as solid favorites, but they left looking like passengers on a sinking ship with one oar and a prayer.
Logano led the most laps of the day—thirty-five of them, to be exact—but his 16th-place finish felt like watching a Broadway actor get replaced by an understudy halfway through the show. It wasn’t for lack of trying, either. The two-time champion did everything right until the race turned into a fuel-saving free-for-all, and suddenly the bottom lane went from freight train to school bus.
“It’s pretty apparent the second we lost control of the race,” Logano said afterward, sounding like a man narrating a disaster movie. “I’m only driving one car, so I couldn’t really control the race. The car behind me was saving gas—that didn’t help us and killed the whole bottom lane. Cars were pulling in front of us, and we were just getting demoted from the first two cars in line to the back of the line.”
Translation: it was like being the captain of a ship whose crew suddenly decided to paddle in reverse.
Logano didn’t mince words about how it felt to watch the race slip away: “We just can’t be saving gas at the end of the race. Ryan was not, but I was frustrated. You’re helpless. You’re sitting there just driving in circles knowing the right thing to do and just can’t do it. I drive one car.”
If there was ever a quote that summed up the chaos of superspeedway racing, that’s it. Everyone knows what to do—until the moment they can’t.
And now? It’s “all or nothing,” Logano says, heading into Martinsville. “Stage points aren’t going to matter. Nothing else is going to matter but winning.”
That’s not bluster. That’s the sound of a defending champion who knows he’s about to be backed into a corner, swinging.
As for Blaney—normally cool as the other side of the pillow—he wasn’t exactly whistling Dixie either after his 23rd-place finish. “Not the finish we wanted,” he said flatly. “We didn’t do what we needed to do, and we didn’t get help when we needed it. Now we have to go win next week.”
No drama. No fluff. Just the hard math of NASCAR’s playoff system—win, or watch someone else do donuts at Phoenix.
The silver lining? Martinsville is practically Blaney’s second home. He’s won there twice in the past four races and is the defending winner of the fall event. If there’s a place for redemption, it’s the paperclip-shaped bullring of Virginia, where patience goes to die and tempers flare like a Fourth of July finale.
So here we are: the powerhouse Penske duo, both below the cutline, heading into a short track knife fight with their title hopes hanging by a thread.
For a team that’s looked so composed all season, it’s suddenly pedal-to-the-metal desperation. The next stop isn’t just Martinsville—it’s survival. And for Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney, it’s not just about keeping the dream alive. It’s about proving that the empire hasn’t fallen. Not yet.
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.
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