Did Joey Logano just go from Chase bubble to title contender (again)?

What a difference seven weeks can make -- just ask Joey Logano. Back on June 28, Logano was coming off a 24th-place finish at Sonoma Raceway, his eighth finish that low (or worse) in 18 races. He had zero wins on the season, with just a pair of top-five finishes and five top 10s -- just the second time he’d gone winless through the first 18 races of a season since 2013. And perhaps most concerning, the mediocre run in California’s Wine Country dropped Logano to 20th in the Cup Series point standings, his worst position of the season with just eight races remaining before The Chase.

In the first season of NASCAR’s renewed Chase postseason format, Logano appeared to be doing little to dispel the notion that the three-time champion under the old playoff system would be less suited to winning titles in this new era -- or even survive the regular-season cutline at all. But then, something began to shift in the No. 22 car’s performance. While his Driver Rating remained slightly below average (67.7) the following week at Chicagoland, Logano still managed to finish 12th, his best showing in a month, to improve to 18th in the points -- still below the cutline but drawing closer. Even at the time, we expressed concern Logano could end up being the odd man out of a crowded Chase picture, despite calling for improved form for the Penske cars going forward. But few outside the No. 22 team foresaw exactly how much Logano and crew chief Paul Wolfe would improve from there: Starting at EchoPark Speedway (a recurring Logano favorite that has seen him win twice in the Next Gen era), Joey has strung together four top 10s in five races -- including a pair of wins -- and five straight Driver Ratings of 91.4 or higher, with an average of 113.8 over that span. Not coincidentally, Logano has gone from sitting below the Chase cutline to rising all the way to ninth in the standings, 142 points clear of elimination. What once seemed like an uncertain championship future suddenly looks a lot rosier.

Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised that, when backed against the wall with his postseason prospects dwindling, Logano responded with a series of elite performances. After all, this is one of the best clutch drivers of his generation. As we detailed during last year’s playoffs, Logano always has a tendency to elevate his game when the stakes are highest, outperforming his regular-season metrics in all but a few of his postseason runs and maintaining a triple-digit average Driver Rating when actively in a championship pursuit. But even by Joey’s standards, this recent stretch has turned the clock back to a level of dominance we hadn’t seen in a while. The last time we saw him produce a five-race streak this strong -- with an average Driver Rating of at least 113.8 and an Adjusted Points+ index of 268 -- was in November 2020, when he closed out the season with five straight top 10s (four of which were podium finishes). Before that, his last such stretch was late in the 2018 campaign, and before that, late in 2016. (Are we sensing a pattern of elite late-season performances here?)

If anything, a run like this in July and August is on the early side for Logano. But what does it mean for his chances of making a true bid at his fourth Cup Series title? Well, as good as Joey has been recently, he probably has a bit more work to do over the next two races at New Hampshire and Daytona. Much has been made of the importance of finishing in the top six of the final regular-season standings if a driver wants a legitimate chance to win the championship. That’s the line at which a driver begins The Chase within 50 points of the No. 1 seed, and it also happens to be the lowest position from which a hypothetical eventual champ ended the regular season when we reconstructed the current Chase rules for the playoff era (2017-2025):

While there may be some wiggle room to work with around where the true barrier of realistic contending sits -- my simulation-based forecast model gives about a 5% chance to drivers who enter The Chase outside the top six seeds -- it is also true that no driver in the playoff era rose any higher than fourth in the final rankings from Logano’s current perch at No. 9 in the standings, and the vast majority of them ended up finishing sixth or lower. But that’s if we think Logano is going to keep driving like the typical No. 9 seed in the regular-season standings. And lately, there has been nothing typical about the way the No. 22 has been performing. Just seven short weeks ago, the question was whether Joey would make The Chase at all. Now the question is whether the rest of the field should be as scared to have him there under the current format as they perennially were during the playoff era.