Three Cup Series championships. Thirty-eight wins. Roger Penske’s employee, Paul Wolfe, is one of the most successful crew chiefs in the Cup garage. And yet, somewhere in the middle of a brutal 2026 season, he found himself wondering if he still knew what he was doing calling the shots from No. 22 pit stall.
Watch What’s Trending Now!
“What have you done lately?” he said on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “It doesn’t matter if we’ve won three championships and however many races. You’ve got to show up every week and prove yourself again.”
He was not being modest. He meant it. “I for sure start to doubt if we forgot what we’re doing. But we didn’t stop working because of it. It’s just not a great spot to be in.”
That is a rare thing to hear from someone of his standing. But the first twenty races of 2026 gave him real reasons to feel that way. Logano finished 30th or worse seven times before the summer.
He dropped as low as 20th in the standings. The same No. 22 team that had won a championship two years earlier was regularly finishing laps behind the leaders.
Part of it was a Ford-wide problem. Chevrolet and Toyota outpaced them on intermediate tracks all spring. Part of it was execution. Through all of it, Wolfe says Logano kept Roger Penske’s team from unraveling.
“Joey’s done a good job of remaining calm and just keeping a level head, even when we’re not performing like we need to,” he said. “That’s his job and my job, to keep the guys working and continuing to try to be better each week.”
That calmness, Roger Penske’s employee Paul Wolfe suggests, is what held the outfit together long enough for things to turn around. On July 19 at North Wilkesboro Speedway, Logano led 323 of 450 laps and won going away. Forty-five races without a win, then complete domination.
Short, flat tracks are where Wolfe and Logano have always been at their best, and North Wilkesboro was the clearest proof of that in a long time.
“We kind of proved that out as we saw an opportunity and had an opportunity, and we capitalized on it,” Wolfe said.
The win pushed Roger Penske’s driver Logano to 15th in the standings and into the Chase. But the position is fragile. He is just 16 points above the cutline and one bad race can push him outside the Top 16. The good news is that the #22 has the experience to brave out this situation and the leadership of Wolfe.
Wolfe has won championships from tighter spots than this. Be it the 2010 O’Reilly Series title when he remade the whole programme, or 2012 again, with the same drive as Brad Keselowski.
Then he went on to repeat this with Logano in 2022 and 2024. That’s where you see his work truly shine. It is tough to judge or predict whether the #22 will be in title contention, but you can never rule out a late Penske charge.