Joey Logano’s 2025 Cup Series campaign has been a rollercoaster. With 29 races, he has collected 1 win, 9 top-10s, 5 top-5s, and 1 pole, putting him in 10th in the points standings and two points behind the cutoff line in the playoff picture. He has shown glimpses of dominance, leading 394 laps this season and nailing the pole at Atlanta on a tiebreaker after matching a time, only to fall short in consistency. But speed and flashes are not enough to carry him through what’s shaping up to be a punishing playoff round.

Team Penske, meanwhile, has been wrestling with growing pains of its own in 2025. They have led 72% of laps run this season among its top drivers: Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney, and Austin Cindric, yet those dominant statistics haven’t always translated into race wins. The team has also been burned by misfortunes, including late-race strategy errors, balky restarts, and tight dirt-track style restarts, exposing weaknesses. With the playoffs looming, Team Penske’s pressure is rising, and Denny Hamlin knows that.

Denny Hamlin raises the stakes on Team Penske’s playoff battle

In his Actions Detrimental podcast, Denny Hamlin emphasized how speed alone won’t carry many through, but consistency and avoiding mistakes will. The Round of 12 begins with New Hampshire, Kansas, and the Charlotte Roval, tracks where strategy and composure often make the difference. Team Penske’s Austin Cindric, Joey Logano, and Ross Chastain enter this round with some flashes of brilliance, but also some shaky finishes. “I will say someone in the top five points will make it out of this round,” said Hamlin. So, will Team Penske’s drivers rise to that consistency?

Co-host, Jared Allen, further added, “Yeah, the first round is always like an appetizer. Because you’ve got guys that win one race that are back in the pack when it comes to the point standings. They’re more or less penciled in to get knocked out the first round just based on points in their average running position. The second round now is where it gets tighter and one little mistake can cost you,” and the Penske drivers illustrate that tension. Logano has often found himself battling at the front, yet has had to scrap back on restarts and through closing laps.

Cindric, on the other hand, has won once in the 2025 Jack Link’s 500 race at Talladega Superspeedway, but he has also had several races with finishes outside the top 20 or due to poor luck. Now, New Hampshire is flat and technical; Kansas brings a different speed profile; the Charlotte Roval combines road course and oval challenges. Penske’s trio has a variable history at these tracks. “Off of speed, I think this is where Cindric and probably Logano are going to need some help. Chastain also is borderline when it comes to speed. I just can’t ever tell; they’re just not running in the top five very often,” Hamlin evaluated.

Chastain has had strong performances on road-course-like tracks, but hasn’t shown dominance at New Hampshire. Logano is often good at the intermediate ovals, but raw speed and strategy in tight traffic or changing conditions could expose vulnerabilities. Cindric has had to fight through mid-race position losses, and at Kansas, restarts and tire management are key. “Now, they did at Darlington for the most part of the race there, they were up in the top five, but they just haven’t shown me very much speed in those cars. So, I think those three are going to have to either execute really well, good strategy, good fortune, or you’re going to need some of these others to mess up, I think,” Hamlin opined.

For instance, Hamlin’s win at Gateway saw Blaney and Logano finish 4th and 5th, respectively, but Cindric dropped to 19th with strategy issues late in stages. Hamlin then predicted, “I think if it’s based off of speed, it’s Cindric, Logano, and Chastain, and then one of us in the top 5 just because it’s NASCAR racing.” While the Joe Gibbs Racing trio has powered through to the Round of 12, for Team Penske, good fortune like an untimed caution or a well-timed pit stop can tilt the balance.

Denny Hamlin calls out chaos after Bristol’s marathon of cautions

Bristol Motor Speedway has always been a stage for chaos, but the 2025 Night Race pushed the limits of what even veterans expected. The numbers told the story: 14 cautions and 137 laps under yellow, the most in NASCAR’s modern era. For fans in the grandstands and crews on pit road, it felt less like a sprint and more like a survival test. Denny Hamlin, who has seen his fair share of wild nights on short tracks, summed it up bluntly, saying, “We ran a lot of caution.”

One of the most jarring interruptions came when Chase Elliott’s engine expired in a plume of smoke, spreading oil across the high-banked half-mile after contact with John Hunter Nemechek, forcing NASCAR into a lengthy cleanup. The long pause only heightened Hamlin’s frustration with the rhythm of the event. “Our cautions are Chase Elliott blew up and we beached the whole track.” Hamlin said, pointing to how a single incident can grind Bristol to a halt. For drivers banking on strategy and track positions, it was a nightmare scenario.

But it wasn’t just mechanical failures; the night was riddled with collisions. Multi-car accidents, like the Cole Custer and Bubba Wallace tangle late in the race or Alex Bowman’s contact with Riley Herbst at Lap 100, showed how unforgiving the track had become. “They were wrecks. It was the most physical short track or race in general, I’d been in in quite some time,” Hamlin continued. With so many restarts and resets, only those who adapted on the fly survived, and Bristol once again lived up to its reputation as NASCAR’s arena of mayhem.