Joey Logano’s Richmond victory did more than add another win to his 2026 NASCAR Cup Series resume. It continued a remarkable late-season climb that has taken the Team Penske driver from 20th to ninth in the standings in only six races. And while he was still celebrating his Cook Out 400 win, team owner Roger Penske was already looking ahead.
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For Penske, ninth in the championship is not good enough. And Logano, on SiriusXM NASCAR radio, revealed what the boss told him.
“I was in Victory Lane and my phone dings; it’s Roger Penske. ‘So you’re ninth in points, now, go for sixth.’”
The No. 22 Ford has become one of the hottest cars in the Cup Series in recent weeks. Logano himself struggled for much of the summer, even calling his car “junk” at Darlington in May. But things changed at North Wilkesboro, where he led 323 laps to win the race and end a 45-race winless streak. And then came Richmond.
He sat 13th in the standings with 586 points heading into the Cook Out 400. But the 73 points he earned that weekend moved him up to ninth.
Now, with two wins and three top-five finishes in his last four races, the three-time Cup champion has firmly put himself back in the conversation near the front of the field. Penske, however, is looking beyond simply making the Chase.
There is a good reason for the urgency. Under NASCAR’s new format, the top seed starts the playoffs with 2,100 points, while the second and third seeds start with 2,075 and 2,065, respectively. After that, drivers lose five points for each position they drop in the standings. That means every position Logano gains now gives him a valuable points advantage heading into the 10-race playoffs.
If Logano moved from ninth to sixth, it would give him a stronger starting position and reduce the amount of ground he would need to make up against the drivers ahead of him.
That logic also fits with Chase Briscoe’s recent assessment of the 2026 format. The Joe Gibbs Racing driver, on the Actions Detrimental podcast, argued that starting position matters a lot this season.
“How the format is now, I think it’s perfect because it still rewards winning. Those 15 extra points make such a huge difference. You can eat such a huge gap really quickly, but you also have to be consistent,” Briscoe, currently fifth in the standings, said after the Cook Out 400.
The 2026 system heavily rewards winning. A race victory is now worth 55 points. Drivers can also collect stage points, with a driver sweeping both stages and the race capable of scoring as many as 75 points in one event.
That means a massive points deficit can disappear quickly. A driver 25 points behind another contender can erase that gap with one exceptional weekend. Logano has just two races to chase Roger Penske’s target and close the 36-point gap to current sixth-place driver Chase Elliott, with New Hampshire next before Daytona.
He hasn’t won at either track in the Next Gen era, but he arrives with plenty of momentum. Even without another victory, a top-five or top-10 finish, combined with strong stage points, could help him climb further up the standings.