Analysis: Blaney aside, Team Penske is in unfamiliar spot: On Chase bubble

The stretch run of the Cup Series season is generally Team Penske’s time to shine. Since the 16-driver, elimination-style playoff era began in 2014, the team has tended to produce second-half finishes 9.9% better (by Adjusted Points+ index) than in the first half, and they’re known in particular for turning things up during the postseason itself. Over that same span, only two of the team’s 32 full-time entries -- Joey Logano in 2017 and Austin Cindric in 2023 -- failed to make the playoffs, and the team won four of a possible 12 championships as well.

So, with the second half of the 2026 Cup Series season officially underway (Round 19 of 36 was this past weekend at Chicagoland), we might expect The Captain’s crew to settle in for another potential championship bid -- or at least to send all of its cars to the postseason, as has happened in seven of eight seasons since Penske went to three cars in 2018. Instead, Team Penske is in a real fight to get as many of its drivers into The Chase as possible. While Ryan Blaney is No. 3 in the standings and ought to have his eye on the championship prize again without worry that he’ll miss The Chase -- his place there is practically guaranteed -- the team’s other two drivers have a lot to fret about. Austin Cindric ranks 15th in the points, just 27 points clear of Ryan Preece on the wrong side of the cutline, and Joey Logano sits an unthinkably low 18th, trailing Preece by 12 points. In other words, if the season ended today, one of the Penske drivers not named “Blaney” would barely hang onto a Chase spot, and the other would miss it altogether. If somehow they both missed, it would be the only time a single Team Penske entry made the postseason during its time as a three-car outfit. In part, Cindric and Logano can point to a down year for the Fords overall. Between Penske, RFK Racing, Front Row Motorsports, Wood Brothers Racing and Carl Long’s Garage 66, Ford has one win (by Blaney in March at Phoenix), seven podiums and 12 top fives -- all of which lag behind Toyota in a banner season and Chevrolet (six wins, 19 podiums and 36 top fives, albeit with about 70% more cars in the field each week). Logano and Cindric have at least been outdriving the other Fords; Logano has a 93-86 head-to-head record (52.0%) against fellow Ford drivers, while Cindric is 91-88 (50.8%). But those are uncharacteristically low numbers for Penske drivers -- especially Logano. Since 2014, only five seasons by full-time Penske drivers even saw a head-to-head success rate against fellow Fords below 59.8%, much less hovering around 50%. Meanwhile, Blaney’s 143-36 mark against Fords (79.9%) is the fourth-best for Penske in that era. Which gets us to the truly unflattering comparison for Cindric and Logano: Blaney’s parallel performance. The No. 12 is 31-7 (81.6%) versus his teammates head-to-head this season, the best mark by one Penske driver against the rest of his team since Brad Keselowski went 33-4 (89.2%) against AJ Allmendinger and Sam Hornish, Jr. in 2012. Certainly, it’s by far the best head-to-head showing since the team expanded to three cars in 2018:

The flipside of when one of your drivers is having a dominant head-to-head season against teammates is that your other drivers are, by definition, not performing at the same level. (In fact, Blaney actually has a worse H2H record against all Cup Series foes: 508-191, or 72.7%.) For Cindric, this is kind of par for the course -- the rest of his numbers are around his usual output, and he even has a winning overall record against the Cup field (363-336) despite going 10-28 against teammates. But for Logano, 2026 has a good case to be the worst season of his Cup career, and certainly since his first full-time season as a teenager replacing Tony Stewart in the Home Depot No. 20 for Joe Gibbs Racing. Logano’s Driver Rating (74.7) is his lowest since 2011 (73.8) and 13.3 points below his average from the five years before; his Adjusted Points+ index (96) is his lowest ever as a full-time driver, 47 points below his previous five-year average. This is his worst head-to-head showing against teammates (16-22) since going 13-23 versus Keselowski in 2017, and the first time ever his overall record against the Cup field (332-367) has been under .500 in a full season. The good news is that, with both non-Blaney drivers hovering around the cutline, there’s still a halfway-decent chance that both the Nos. 2 and 22 cars can join Blaney in The Chase despite the down performances. Right now, though, it’s more likely Penske gets only two of three drivers in -- and maybe even just one of three, based on the odds from my 10,000 simulations of the remainder of the season:

Changing that begins this very weekend. Logano has the best recent record of any driver at Atlanta and its similar tracks, while Cindric ranks seventh. Though hoping for strong performances at a drafting track is far from ideal, this is also a unique opportunity -- particularly coming on the heels of their second-best combined finish (12.5) since Bristol in mid-April at Chicagoland this past weekend.

But if Penske’s old second-half magic is going to show up again for anybody outside the 12 car, now would be a good time. Because for Cindric and (especially) Logano, this year’s stretch run isn’t about rounding into championship form as much as it is about surviving life on the cutline.