Joey Logano hadn’t won at Richmond Raceway since April 2017. Nine years and one genuinely rough start to the 2026 season later, he finally got back to victory lane there Saturday night — and picked about the worst possible week to remind the rest of the Chase field what a fast No. 22 Ford looks like.
Logano’s Team Penske Ford held off Chase Briscoe’s Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota by 0.392 seconds in the Cook Out 400, the finale of a three-series Saturday at Richmond, and the margin undersells how much work it took to get there. He led six different times across the 400-lap night and didn’t take the lead for keeps until a pit-stop cycle with 25 laps remaining. “So close, but sweet redemption today,” he said afterward. It was his second win in his last four starts and the 39th of a career that already includes three Cup Series championships.
Richmond Rewards Patience, Not Just Horsepower
This wasn’t a random pairing of driver and track. Logano’s only two previous Cup wins at the 0.75-mile Virginia oval came the same way this one did — quiet positioning through 400 laps of traffic, then a late move built on brake feel rather than raw speed. Richmond punishes tire and brake abuse in equal measure, and Saturday made the brake half of that equation obvious: Chase Briscoe led a race-high 171 laps but said fading brakes late in the run cost him the bite he needed to challenge Logano again off the corner. Lose a few feet of stopping distance on entry at a three-quarter-mile bullring and you lose the run off the corner with it — and at Richmond, that’s the whole race.
Ryan Blaney had looked like the fastest car in the field for most of the weekend and backed it up early, claiming the pole and leading 60 of 70 laps to win Stage 1 for a series-leading sixth stage victory of the season. His Ford faded to 13th by the finish, one of several Team Penske cars that flashed speed at different points of the night without matching Logano’s execution when it mattered.
How the No. 22 Found Speed Again
Six races ago, Logano’s team was running 20th in the standings — an uncomfortable spot for a three-time champion in what he’s called the slowest start of his career. The climb back to ninth has come from the unglamorous stuff Team Penske builds its program around: cross-referencing setup notes with teammates Blaney and Austin Cindric, leaning on simulation data between events, and simply logging laps until the setup notebook caught up with the Next Gen car’s quirks. It’s the same pattern that’s carried Logano through three title runs — the No. 22 rarely looks like the class of the field in the spring, but it has a habit of finding speed once the schedule gets serious.
The Chase Field Is Two Races From Final
The timing matters because only two regular-season races remain — next Sunday’s Dollar Tree 301 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway and the regular-season finale at Daytona — before NASCAR locks in its 16-driver Chase field. Seven drivers have already clinched a spot: points leader Denny Hamlin, Blaney, Ty Gibbs, five-race winner Tyler Reddick, and Saturday’s newest clinchers, Briscoe, Chase Elliott and Christopher Bell. Logano sits ninth and is comfortably inside the field for now. The real tension is at the bottom of the standings: Austin Cindric’s third-place run, his best finish of 2026, pulled him from 16th to 15th, while Shane van Gisbergen currently holds the final transfer spot with a 50-point cushion over Ryan Preece and a 63-point edge on teammate Ross Chastain.
The Inspection That Still Has to Happen
None of it is official until NASCAR’s inspectors say so. Logano’s car passed post-race inspection at the track, but his No. 22 will join Cindric’s No. 2, Briscoe’s No. 19 and the No. 97 at NASCAR’s Research & Development Center in Concord for engine dynamometer testing — running each motor on a stand to confirm it produces the horsepower and rev range the rulebook allows. The No. 19 and No. 20 cars go a step further with a full teardown, where inspectors physically disassemble the engine to check tolerances a dyno can’t catch. It’s standard procedure for a weekend’s fastest cars, not an accusation, but it’s a useful reminder that a win like Saturday’s doesn’t become permanent until the paperwork agrees with the stopwatch.
Two races remain to settle who joins Logano in the Chase, and the version of the No. 22 that showed up at Richmond is not one the rest of the field wanted to see with the picture this close to final. Blaney defends his own win at New Hampshire next Sunday — after the way Saturday ended, he’d be forgiven for watching his mirrors as closely as the leaderboard.
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