HAMPTON, Ga. — Sometimes the best-hatched plans just work out, especially when the stakes are highest. When Team Penske mates Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney lined up for the final restart in Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs curtain-lifter at Atlanta Motor Speedway, the execution — as it had been all day — was as crisp as the perfectly sharp seams of a Team Penske oxford shirt.

Roger Penske-owned cars made the maximum of Sunday’s playoff-opening Quaker State 400, won by Logano’s No. 22 Ford in overtime thanks to a stout and timely push to the front by Blaney’s No. 12 Mustang, battered, bruised and patched from a final-stage stack-up. The last two Cup Series champions took control of the final two-lap dash, providing a brilliant launching pad for the organization after the first of 10 postseason races. Blaney placed third by just a hair behind runner-up Daniel Suárez in a coincidental reprise of their photo finish at Atlanta from February, and third team driver Austin Cindric ended up 10th after dominating the opening two stages.

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All three found solid footing for postseason starters. Team Penske navigated a wild-card race that caused havoc for several of the 16 playoff contenders at the high-banked, superspeedway-style hybrid. The three-car outfit minimized unforced errors, and any pitfalls that arose that weren’t of its doing were deftly deflected with a mix of resilience and veteran poise. The organization dedicated the victory to the memory of Roy McCauley, a former crew chief and longtime lead for the team’s assembly shop who died last month.

“We knew we needed to execute here,” Travis Geisler, Team Penske’s competition director, told NASCAR.com. “This was one we had circled as an important race for us to, if you didn’t win, you needed to gather up a lot of points, and I feel great about the only car that didn’t gather up a ton of stage points got the win, so we kind of executed that as needed. Sometimes luck’s on your side, the 12 being able to recover from that issue, and he definitely put the rally cap on there to come from last to what looks like third now, but I mean, Team Penske is built for the playoffs, I think. I can’t say enough about what Roy McCauley has done to make that part of what our company DNA is. He did such a great job of preparing us for this time of year every year, and now we’re just trying to carry through on his work.”

Built for the playoffs feels like a Team Penske trait, but the organization has also established itself as a force at superspeedway-style racing, with Logano, Blaney and Cindric combining to lead 134 of Sunday’s 266 laps. Since Atlanta’s transformation into a drafting-reliant track in 2022, Logano has won twice in six races, and those performances have helped to tilt what’s otherwise a fairly level, underdog-friendly playing field.

Mapping out all potential strategies also helped shift the tide. As the race progressed, Logano keyed his radio with a reminder to set a pre-discussed plan for restarts in motion. Pressed for details about what the drivers game-planned in the motorcoach lot, Logano said the finer points of how they drew it up would stay under wraps.

“We go over a lot of stuff together,” Logano said. “We prep a lot together, separately and together sometimes. Speedway racing these days, it’s just so interesting. Every track is a little bit different, Daytona, Talladega, Atlanta, all kind of a breed of their own. When you have fast cars like we do right now on these speedways, it’s important for to us capitalize as a team. These are our bread and butter right now. We’ve proven that really over the last year-plus, that this is our type of race track.”

WATCH: Logano on Round of 16 strategy following win | Blaney talks through day | Cindric critiques top-10 finish

After the race, Blaney met Cindric as he left pit road, offering congratulations and telling him that their plan worked out. Like Logano, he also opted to keep the details of the X’s and O’s to himself.

“No, I can’t tell you about that,” Blaney laughed. “We work really hard at planning out, ‘Hey, if we’re in these spots.’ We do that really well as a team, between myself and Joey and Austin and Harrison (Burton) of, ‘Hey, if we’re in these positions at the end of these speedway races, how do we approach it, right? Let’s try to have a plan,’ and if we are in this spot, OK, now we kind of know what to do or what we are thinking, just so you’re on the same page.”

All three drivers benefited from the synergy. The victory granted Logano safe passage to the playoffs’ next phase, the Round of 12, but the Atlanta tote board also showed Team Penske with three of the top four points-earners for the afternoon. Blaney and Cindric alternated their placements in sweeping 1-2 finishes at the stage breaks, each gathering 19 additional points. Those bonuses moved Blaney into the Cup Series points lead for the second time this season and shoved Cindric up three spots in the playoff standings, his cushion above the elimination line swelling to plus-27.

How they preserved those early showings required a recovery effort, and Blaney’s sponsor seemed fitting at the end of it. The damaged No. 12 Team Penske Ford he wrangled to a third-place finish wore large, shiny patches of 200-mph tape on its driver’s side — battle scars from a Lap 205 crack-up with Chris Buescher and Martin Truex Jr. The tape partially obscured his car number and the fender placement of his on-the-nose sponsor, Dent Wizard.

Both how the car straightened out after wall contact and how much work his crew put in to keep it intact were reasons for Blaney to marvel.

“It’s a good day. You know, I can’t really complain,” Blaney said. “I think it’s pretty much the most points you could score out there without winning.”

MORE: Cup Series standings | At-track photos: Atlanta

Cindric was torn about how his day unfolded. He led a race-best 92 laps by commanding the race’s second stage, but a pit sequence early in the final stage included contact and sluggishness on the left-front that forced him to restart 19th. Cindric rallied for a top-10 finish and a potent points bounty but absorbed the feeling of missed opportunity when the potential for a round-saving victory evaporated.

“I feel exactly the same as how I walked in this morning,” said Cindric, who started fifth. “I expected a performance like today. I expected a qualifying effort like we had yesterday. I think the expectation is high within our organization and, honestly, within myself. So I felt like a win was very possible today, and we didn’t do that. So I’m right in the middle, very neutral.”

Logano didn’t have the best points total of the Team Penske trio, but putting his No. 22 car in Victory Lane made those markers almost immaterial. Logano might’ve entered the postseason slightly overlooked, a strange spot for a two-time Cup Series champion and the only active driver eligible for a shot at a third title this year. He started the playoffs midpack among a gaggle of one-race winners from the regular season, but Sunday’s Atlanta win placed him front and center in the postseason ranks.

“When it’s playoff time, it’s our time,” Logano exulted after exiting his car on Atlanta’s frontstretch. He may as well have been speaking for all three Team Penske drivers, but he also established a foundation for what could be his sixth Championship 4 bid. Just like Sunday’s play-calling, that’s the plan.

“Yeah, I think confidence in his team, our experience, what we’ve been able to do in the past in big moments, big situations where there’s a lot on the line,” said No. 22 crew chief Paul Wolfe. “I said that to some people earlier this week, that when we get to playoff time, like worrying about ‘Is Joey Logano going to be performing where I need him to be’ is the last thing on my mind. You know when it’s playoff time, he’s going to show up and give you all he’s got, can handle situations like this.

“If anything, he thrives on this.”