Joey Logano and the No. 22 Shell-Pennzoil Ford Fusion team collected their fourth-straight top-10 finish to start the 2015 season, coming home eighth in Sunday afternoon’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series event at Phoenix International Raceway. Logano started second and was able to jump out to an early lead as the green flew, leading the event’s first 25 laps. Logano then slipped back into the clutches of Kevin Harvick and rode inside the top-five for much of the afternoon. Through the first 200 laps of the event, Logano never found himself worse than seventh in the rundown. All afternoon long, Logano fought a car that was loose on entry and exit and tight in the center. Despite the ill-handling conditions, Logano continued to be a top-10 car. A final pit stop with less than 20 to go put Logano in the 15th position. Following another quick caution, Logano found himself 16th with just 12 laps remaining but with four fresh tires. Logano was able to race his way from 16th to eighth over the final 12 laps to notch his fourth-straight top-10 finish to start the year. With the solid finish, Logano moved up to second in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series point standings.

“That is not quite where we wanted to be there at the end of the day. Todd (Gordon) made a gutsy call at the end to put four on it and we were back to 16th with 12 to go. Really at that point, he was leaving it up to me to be aggressive and we were able to pass a lot of cars to get up to eighth. Getting a top-10 is great, but we want to win some more. We just didn’t quite have the speed. We had speed in the beginning of the race and made some adjustments and got better and then the track changed and we couldn’t keep up with it. We couldn’t fix the car no matter what we tried we were going the wrong way. We still have some setup issues we have to try to work out with the Shell-Pennzoil Ford and we will be back at it soon. We have speed in qualifying and started up front and ran up front but when we lost our track position it was really hard to get back up there.”