by Nate Ryan, NASCAR
As the youngest driver to start the Daytona 500 and the first Cup champion born in the 1990s, Joey Logano is accustomed to making NASCAR history.
But the Team Penske superstar rarely makes unprecedented headlines in such befuddling and bizarre ways as this season.
The first defending champion without a top 10 in the first five races of the season following a title? That dubious distinction now belongs to Logano.
The most laps led (ever!) through five races by a driver without a top 10? Logano has led 247 laps (and won two stages) while somehow placing no higher than 12th.
For any other team, alarm bells might be blaring of a season imploding amid misfortune and missed opportunities.
For Logano, it’s just another chapter of a familiar adversity marking the No. 22 Ford’s pathways to three championships.
“Just rolling with the punches like I typically do at this time of year,” Logano said recently. “You try to just maximize your day. Lead laps, score as many stage points as you can, get the best finish you possibly can.”
It’s exactly what Logano has done in 2025 — racking up the fourth-most stage points (50) for a comfortable eighth in the standings (15 positions ahead of his ranking through five races last year).
The results reveal a slow start, but the reality is it fits the pattern. In each of his three title seasons, Logano won the Round of 8 opener and the championship race — ending on a high after largely unremarkable regular seasons left him overlooked in the playoffs.
Homestead-Miami Speedway is a good reminder this weekend. In 2018, Logano was massively overshadowed entering the finale on the 1.5-mile oval before he beat “The Big Three” of Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch and Martin Truex Jr. for his first championship.
Logano’s struggles this season are a mix of poor execution (driver and team mistakes, as well as mechanical woes) and luck (he was poised to win at Las Vegas before a late caution).
But until playoff crunch time, it’s foolish to doubt a resilient team whose pedigree includes another strange statistical anomaly.
It’s never won a championship — or made the title round — in an odd-numbered year.
That still could become the history Logano is most remembered for making in 2025.
(Photo by Mike Mulholland/Getty Images)
