• Joey Logano started 13th and finished third in Sunday evening’s Cookout Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway in the No. 22 Shell-Pennzoil Ford Mustang. While Logano scored his seventh top-five result of the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series season, the path to the third-place result was anything but easy. After a calm first stage, Logano suffered damage from a cut tire coming to the conclusion of the second stage, and on the restart to begin the final stage, suffered significant damage to the rear of the Shell-Pennzoil Ford. Perseverance from the No. 22 Ford team and great work in the pits positioned Logano for a run in the latter stages of the race to regain his track position and come home with a solid top-five result.
• After starting 13th, Logano moved inside the top-10 to the eighth position before the lap 25 competition caution, reporting the balance of the No. 22 Shell-Pennzoil Ford Mustang was good overall. Logano pitted again at lap 73 and elected to have the crew make no changes to the car as the balance was fairly good overall. By the end of the stage, Logano reported he had gone significantly to the free side as the sunset over Darlington Raceway. The team elected to make a trackbar and air pressure change at the stage ending stop.
• Logano raced inside the top-five through the opening portion of the second stage, showing solid long run speed. At lap 172, the team pitted for four tires a slight air pressure adjustment and a small trackbar change. With two laps remaining in the second stage, Logano had a tire go down, and made slight wall contact with the right side, resulting in a long stage ending stop.
• With the crew making repairs, Logano lined up in the 26th position for the final stage start, but suffered more damage as the field stacked up coming to the green. Logano made a forward rally, cycling back inside the top-10 after the team elected to make two stops to get to the end of the race instead of stretching the run out and risking another tire failure.
• A caution flag with 48 laps remaining in the race gained the No. 22 Shell-Pennzoil crew valuable track position, bringing all the lead lap competitors to pit road for a potential final stop of the race. Logano ran in the top-five late in the final stage, moving to third after the race leading Nos. 9 and 19 made contact with the wall.
• Logano maintained the third position until the checkered flag, salvaging what would have been a disaster race after sustaining damage on three of the Shell-Pennzoil Mustang’s four corners. The 22 crew heads to Richmond International Raceway third in the playoff standings, 27 points above the cutline.

 

“We fought hard. You’ve got to do it for Bobby Allison. You’ve got the coolest paint scheme on the racetrack you’ve got to do the best you can to try to get a victory. Man, hard fought. We kind of were decent, it’s just so hard to pass with these big spoilers on the car at this racetrack. That makes it challenging. We had a right-front go down the last lap of the second stage, hit the wall and we did a good job fixing the car and then strategy worked well, so Paul did great there, and then they had an amazing pit stop the last stop, had a good restart and all of a sudden I was like, ‘Shoot, we could win this thing. To see what the left-rear looks like after that I was pretty impressed to get whatever we got. It’s funny how the team always tells you, ‘How does the damage look?’ ‘It looks great. It looks great.’ You get out and you’re like, ‘Whoa!’ Overall, that’s what we needed to do. We need to come out of these playoffs running hard and having a solid top three finish to start the playoffs with a couple stage points is a good way to start.”