Joey Logano started fifth and finished fifth in the 1996 Throwback Shell-Pennzoil Ford Fusion in Sunday evening’s Bojangles’ Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway. Logano started in the fifth position after qualifying was cancelled due to inclement weather. At the start of the race, Logano dropped to the bottom half of the top-10 struggling with a loose handling Ford Fusion. However, as the first run continued, Logano began reclaiming lost positions and working back to the top-six before pitting for four tires. The handling continued to be loose during the second run and crew chief Todd Gordon called for more adjustments on the second pit stop. When the first caution of the race flew at lap 95, Logano, like many of the leaders found himself trapped a lap down as pit stops had not fully cycled through. The majority of the field took the “wave around” and regained the lost lap. Throughout the remainder of the event, Logano proved to have one of the best cars on long runs, and the crew delivered solid pit stops in the closing stages of the event. Logano would close out the event in the fifth position, marking his second consecutive top-five finish in the Bojangles’ Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway.

“Yeah, it just doesn’t matter if it isn’t a win. At this point I guess momentum means something so I guess something matters. We were the fastest car on the long run every time. We hit a lot of short runs at the end and that would kill us. I lost two or three spots every restart for the first five or six laps and then it would kick in and off I would go. I was fighting to get them back. My teammates were fast and we leaned on them and got our Shell-Pennzoil Ford Fusion better, to the point we could have won I think if we ran 100 laps straight at the end.”