At Team Penske, panic is not part of the process.
Even after a rocky start to the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season for both Austin Cindric and teammate Joey Logano, the organization’s collective nerves have remained steady. Trust the process, trust the speed and keep moving forward — all aspects of the fundamental ethos of the “Penske Way.”
Sunday’s Goodyear 400 at Darlington Raceway offered the first meaningful validation of that approach … for one of them, at least.
Cindric’s fifth-place finish marked the No. 2 Ford team’s first breakthrough result of the season, halting an early skid of frustrating finishes despite speed under the hood, delivering a performance that better reflected the pace the group felt it had shown since the opening weeks of the year.
“Definitely an important day from a points perspective, no doubt, but for the team, just having a small reward for the, honestly, the job that everyone’s done so far to start the year with a lot of fast cars,” Cindric said during a Ford Performance media call Wednesday morning. “But you know, racing works in a lot of different ways, and a lot of things are possible, good or bad. So yeah, it’s nice to kind of go get the monkey off our back there a little bit on our side.”
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For Cindric, the result stopped the early-season slide dead in its tracks, with his position in the standings heading into Darlington eliciting nowhere near a semblance of comfort. Through the first stretch of the year, the No. 2 team had shown flashes of competitive speed — there’s nothing fluky about a P3 starting spot at Phoenix, for instance — but struggled to translate it into strong finishes, with a P19 at Las Vegas marking his best result until his smooth dance with “The Lady in Black.”
It’s the kind of start that can quickly create pressure in a consistency-of-results-driven campaign, especially when driving for perhaps the most results-driven owner in motorsports. Inside the Penske garage, however, the tone never shifted toward desperation.
“I think it’s not a surprise to our group,” Cindric said. “I think you have to look at yourself first, and whether that’s me as a driver or us as a team, and I think it would be hard to identify things, especially in the first four weeks of the year, that you know, we would regret or feel like we put ourselves in those positions.”
Instead, the approach remained rooted in repetition, preparation and concentration — a philosophy that has long defined Roger Penske’s operation.
Just keep your head down and grind.
“So I think having the patience, you know, as a group, we have enough experience, but also enough experience together and enough processes together that you kind of just get lost in the work,” Cindric said.
Darlington also illuminated another storyline inside the Penske camp, however.
While Cindric and teammate Ryan Blaney — who’s one of the two drivers to win a race other than Tyler Reddick this year — both ran inside the top five, the three-time champion Logano endured his toughest race of the young season, struggling mightily throughout the afternoon at the notoriously difficult South Carolina oval to finish 33rd.
From the outside, such stark disparities between teammates can spark speculation about equipment, setup, you name it. But from Cindric’s perspective, Logano’s sudden challenges simply underscore how narrow the competitive margins are at NASCAR’s highest level.
“I mean, I find it a bit difficult to speak for (the No. 22 team), but I think more than anything else, it speaks to how easy it is to be off in the Cup Series,” he said. “And by off, I don’t mean, you know, having a bad day, but like that it’s the cars themselves, the competitive nature, like, everything’s all really sensitive.
“So it’s kind of one of those things that, you know, the smallest piece or part, or not necessarily the car itself. But like a decision, or, you know, a mindset, or just how things fell. When we’re talking about tenths of a pound of air pressure making balance swings throughout a run, nothing really surprises me anymore. …
“ … I don’t think there’s any reason to hit the panic button in that scenario.”
Even minute adjustments can dramatically shift performance over the course of a run. Perhaps six races is too small a sample size, and the No. 22 team — along with the No. 2 group to a smaller degree — just happen to be using their mulligans now. Would you be shocked if, for instance, Logano went on a five-race stretch of top fives, perhaps starting Sunday at Martinsville Speedway (3:30 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN Radio, HBO Max, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), where he hasn’t finished outside the top 10 this decade?
Exactly.
That sensitivity is also why Penske’s internal reaction to a tough race — whether it belongs to Logano, Cindric or any of the organization’s teams — rarely involves trepidation. “Throwing the baby out with the bathwater” isn’t exactly an idiom that exists in Penske’s lexicon. Instead, the response is measured, analytical and data-driven.
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What also helps make a challenging month a bit more digestible for Cindric is leaning on another perspective during the team’s uneven start: the sheer length of the NASCAR Cup Series schedule. With 20 races remaining before The Chase begins — and as a driver who once locked up his postseason spot in February — early standings rarely tell the full story, and they’re not something Cindric has historically put a ton of stock in.
“I mean, ignorance is bliss,” Cindric said. “I’ve never really been in a position to, like, care a ton about points until the playoffs, so I don’t really look at points anyway.”
Instead, experience — the 2020 O’Reilly Auto Parts Series champ is now, somehow, in his fifth full-time Cup Series season — has shown him how quickly things can change.
“You watch all these races from early last year and guys that were low in points that ended up being high in points; like, it’s a long season,” he said. “And things can go right or wrong, and the cream usually does rise to the top.”
Even so, Cindric recognizes the ultimate goal extends beyond simply qualifying for the postseason. And even though a rebound appears to be in motion, a gaping points hole — a nine-place jump in the standings after Darlington still has him outside the top 20 — is still his current reality.
If he’s aiming to round out Penske’s driver lineup and check the box so that all three are champions, he’s got some work to do if he wants that to happen this year.
“If I’m seeded 16th, cool, I made it, but you’re probably not gonna win the championship with the way that maths out,” he said. “But the first goal is to make it to have a shot, period.”
