Joey Logano had one of the most up-and-down days of his NASCAR Sprint Cup Series career on Sunday – from leading early to falling three laps down to racing back into the top-four to dropping back to 17th – and eventually came home 10th in the Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway. Logano started the event from the third position and showed he had one of the strongest cars early on, racing his No. 22 Autotrader Ford Fusion to the lead on lap 37 and strongly running in the top three early. Things unraveled just past the lap 100 mark, when Logano had to make a green-flag stop because of a loose wheel. In the process, the No. 22 team was also penalized by NASCAR for a uncontrolled tire violation, forcing him to come down pit road once again. As a result, Logano went three laps down to the leaders and fell to 38th place. Logano, crew chief Todd Gordon and the rest of the team never gave up and used a fast car and timely cautions to their advantage, taking the wave around three separate times to eventually get back on the lead lap 150 laps later. Once back on the lead lap, Logano showed how strong his Autotrader Fusion was as he raced from 29th to ninth in just 50 laps. Logano would eventually race his way back into the top-five and would run as high as fourth. Things went bad again with less than 35 laps to go when, while restarting fifth, Logano briefly lost all power and stacked the field up on a restart, falling from fifth to 17th while trying to recover. With less than 10 laps to go, Gordon brought Logano down pit road to get fresh tires with little to lose. In the final 10 laps of the event, Logano was able to go from 18th to 10th to earn his fifth top-10 finish of the season. He also moved up one spot in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series point standings and sits fourth, 21 points behind leader Kevin Harvick.

“That was one up-and-down day for sure. We had a fast Autotrader Ford. I think we had a car that could have contended with Carl (Edwards) for the win. We were that fast. Then we had some self-induced mistakes and that put us in a hole. We fought hard and we got all the way back onto the lead lap and raced our way into the top five. I thought we still had a shot at it at that point and then on that late restart, the car just shut off for some reason. We’ve got to figure that out. But I just hate it because I feel like we’ve got a car that’s capable of winning this thing and every time we come here in the spring it’s the same story. We have a fast car and we just don’t get it done. We will come back here in the fall and try and win three in a row.”