Joey Logano walked away from a car that landed on its roof. Walking away from the math has been harder. A week after his No. 22 Ford flipped at Talladega, two pit-stop problems at Martinsville ended his bid for a fourth Cup title, and the three-time champion has since kept circling one question: how close was he, really?
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When Kelly brought up the end of the “even year Logano” run, the Team Penske driver admitted the expectation had become difficult to ignore.
“I mean, yeah, obviously we’re bummed out about it. I don’t know what even year Logano was supposed to mean, like we made the Championship 4, was I supposed to finish fourth or better?” Logano joked, according to the video posted by Kelly Crandell via X.
Kelly reminded him of his 2022 and 2024 titles, before Joey Logano questioned whether the pattern had really started with those years. Kelly then pointed to his summer hot streak and the growing belief that he could do it again. Logano’s response was telling: “Oh yeah, and it looked like it was gonna happen for a minute and then our season got flipped upside down.”
Titles in 2018, 2022 and 2024 had turned even-numbered seasons into a fan-made pattern. The sequence made 2026 another year in which fans expected Logano to contend for a championship, especially after his summer resurgence gave the No. 22 team a genuine shot at extending the run.
The comeback is what made the question fair. At the halfway point, Logano was 20th in the standings, and he was not even inside the Chase field until midsummer. Three short-track victories changed that, pushing him into the postseason ninth in points, 65 behind the leader.
Bristol delivered the highlight, and he finished inside the top 10 in six of the first seven Chase races, keeping the No. 22 in the title conversation deep into October.
Logano called the first six or seven races of the Chase “pretty solid.” The last three were another story. “And like the last three, and I’m like, I like just didn’t go right at the end, and we fell out of contention,” he explained.
The turnaround counts for something. A team that began the summer hoping merely to qualify for the postseason spent most of it as a legitimate title threat, and Logano said as much.
“On one hand, there’s something to be proud of because the regular season was so bad, and we got ourselves to where we were true championship contenders for the majority of the Chase,” he said.
The other side of the ledger was harder to accept. “And on the other hand, your greed will set in, and you’ll be like, dang it, you think about what could have been, right?”
The damage was done on Lap 183 of the YellaWood 500, the eighth race of the 10-race Chase. Running fourth in the high lane, Logano got loose after a push from Carson Hocevar, and a clip from Chase Briscoe‘s Toyota sent the No. 22 airborne and onto its roof in a 15-car pileup. He climbed out under his own power and later said he was just happy to be alive.
The scoreboard damage was brutal. Logano had been 44 points behind Kyle Larson with three races left. He left Alabama 34th and 100 points back, fifth in the standings, after Larson won the race. That 56-point swing explains his lament.
“We were on the edge of making it, like finishing seventh, you’d probably be like, man, we would take that and get the heck out of here,” he said. “But when you find yourself, you know, at one point being, you know, 30, 20-something, 30 points out of it, and you think of Talladega, if we just finished it, we’d be right there within 10 points or so of the lead, it’s hard for greed not to get in the way and think, gosh, like we were so close to doing it.”
How Joey Logano’s Chase collapse compared with other contenders
Logano had a narrow path alive at Martinsville Speedway, but two costly pit-stop problems left him 18th and eliminated, one of four drivers cut that day. Talladega had already ended the title hopes of nine Chase drivers, a reminder of how violently a superspeedway can reorder a playoff.
Logano has won at Talladega three times, but he has gone airborne there before; after an April 2021 crash he complained that a roll bar had struck his head and called it unacceptable.
His experience was not the only example of a promising Chase campaign unraveling. Christopher Bell had moved within five points of the championship lead after winning the Southern 500, only to lose significant ground in the Talladega crash.
Denny Hamlin entered the Chase as the points leader and remained a serious contender, but setbacks late in the postseason left him third in the final standings. Tyler Reddick also revived his championship hopes with a Phoenix victory before his Talladega crash and subsequent elimination at Martinsville.
Their paths were different, but each showed how quickly a strong title position could disappear during the closing races.
With Logano out, just three drivers remained eligible for the championship, two of them longshots. Larson, whose No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet carried a 73-point lead out of Talladega, was the driver everyone else was chasing.
Logano did not dress up the disappointment or pretend the result could be reversed. For a team that spent the summer fighting just to reach the playoff field, the season showed how quickly the No. 22 group can turn things around. His closing message was simple: “It is what it is, can’t change it now. You move on and go try again.”