HAMPTON, Ga. — Ford has spent much of the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season searching for answers, as its 10 full-time drivers have combined for a single points-paying victory through five months. Yet with seven races remaining before the postseason, former series champions Joey Logano and Brad Keselowski still control their own Chase fate.
The spring and early summer months haven’t treated the former Team Penske teammates kindly. Logano has hovered around The Chase cutline for the bulk of the regular season, rising no higher than 12th in the standings since the eighth race of the season at Bristol Motor Speedway. Keselowski has had a string of races to forget, with his last top 10 a distant memory, dating back to Kansas Speedway. Rewinding to Watkins Glen International in early May, the No. 6 team hasn’t finished better than 15th in the last eight events.
Yet both drivers still have a fighting chance to make The Chase, with Logano ranked 18th in the standings, 16 points below bubble driver Erik Jones. Keselowski has plummeted to 20th in points, 19 points to the bad.
“I’m the type of person who likes to point the finger at themselves and think what could I have done better?” Keselowski said on Saturday at EchoPark Speedway. “You are looking at those moments and the things that just happen are life. There’s been a little bit of both.”
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Opportunity looms for both future Hall of Famers. They are arguably the best superspeedway drivers of their generation, with Keselowski leading active drivers with seven victories. Logano has won two of the last seven races at the reconfigured EchoPark 1.5-miler and is on a short list of three active drivers — along with Hendrick Motorsports’ Chase Elliott and William Byron — to score multiple victories at the Atlanta venue.
Add in the fact that few organizations have enjoyed as much success on NASCAR’s short tracks in the Next Gen era as Team Penske. That trend could work in Logano’s favor as the regular season enters its final stretch of races.
“I feel good about the tracks coming our way,” Logano stated. “The short tracks coming up, too — the speedways are one thing, but look at [North] Wilkesboro, Richmond [Raceway], [New Hampshire Motor Speedway] — all of them are tracks we typically excel at.
“I think we’ve made good gains on some of the mile-and-a-halves stuff. I know last week, the first two stages were ugly, but we hit on it eventually and started rolling the last run really well. I wish we had that earlier in the race, but there are definitely signs of light, which I can’t say we’ve had that here recently. We just have to execute through these next few weeks really well and make sure we maximize it.”
Before the Cup Series resets at Darlington Raceway to begin The Chase, the schedule features four races on tracks measuring 1 mile or less, beginning next weekend at North Wilkesboro. Logano has been particularly dominant at the historic venue, leading 199 of 200 laps to win the 2024 All-Star Race and collect the $1 million prize. He backed up that performance last season by leading another 139 laps before finishing runner-up to Christopher Bell.
In the not-too-distant future, there are battles at Iowa Speedway, Richmond and New Hampshire, all tracks favorable to the Ford camp.
“I don’t think they are make-or-breaks, but when you have opportunities at tracks like that where you typically run well, you have to make sure you capitalize on the opportunities that are sitting there,” Logano added.
The No. 6 team remains optimistic, too. While Keselowski has lost 11 positions in the standings over the last seven races — highlighted by four consecutive finishes of 34th or worse — he knows RFK Racing can excel on short tracks. Ryan Preece, another driver fighting for a Chase berth, won the season-opening exhibition Busch Light Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium. And with a pair of drafting tracks on the horizon — Sunday evening at EchoPark and the regular-season finale at Daytona International Speedway — the 2012 champion has six runner-up finishes at drafting tracks since last reaching the Winner’s Circle in the draft at Talladega Superspeedway in 2021.
“We feel really good about a number of the tracks coming up,” Keselowski said. “We’ve had a not-so-great last four or five weeks. I felt like we got out of Sonoma with a decent race and had high expectations for Chicago, and fell flat. That was really disappointing.
“We will see what we have this weekend; we have high expectations for here. There’s not a track in front of us that I don’t feel we can run well at, which is good. But it’s on us to go do that and earn our way into the NASCAR Chase.”
First up is the new Atlanta, where Logano leads the league with 359 laps led in nine starts since the 2022 reconfig and will start alongside Penske teammate Ryan Blaney on the front row. Two of Keselowski’s six second-place efforts on superspeedways in the last five seasons have come at the action-packed circuit.