Joey Logano and the No. 22 Shell-Pennzoil team battled their way back from being a lap down early in the race to eventually score their sixth top-10 finish of the year, coming home eighth in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series event on Sunday at Richmond International Raceway. Logano started second after qualifying was rained out on Friday and the lineup was set by practice speeds. Struggles came early for Logano and the Shell-Pennzoil team however, as the car was tight in the center and extremely loose off the corner. Less than 100 laps into the event, Logano was a lap down and had fallen as far back as 32nd in the field. Crew chief Todd Gordon began taking huge swings to try and fix the Ford Fusion and Logano slowly got better and better. On lap 274, Logano got the “free pass” and got back on the lead lap, giving the team just over 100 laps to try and grab as many positions as possible. With continued adjustments and several powerful restarts, Logano was able to race his way into the top-10 late in the race and drove to eighth as the 400-lap came to an end. The top-10 was Logano’s third-straight of the season, but dropped him one spot in the Sprint Cup Series point standings to fifth. He’s 32 points behind leader Carl Edwards.

“Taking a car from being the 35th-place car to a top-five car throughout a race is quite impressive for what my team was able to do today. It was great teamwork. Everyone kept working hard and those are great opportunities to implode internally as a race team and completely throw away a whole race and start yelling and screaming at each other, but there was not one moment of that today from my team. Everyone was very methodical about the changes and we tried things that didn’t work so we went the other way and it started to work for us. I am proud of the effort from my team today. We need to make the cars a little faster, but I am proud of the effort.”