Start: 7th |  Finish: 1st  | Points: 5th

Stage One: 4th  |  Stage Two: 12th 

Joey Logano locked himself into the Round of 12 in the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs with a dramatic win in the opening race the postseason Sunday at Atlanta, parking the No. 22 Autotrader Ford Mustang in victory lane for his 34^th-career victory. Sunday’s win is Logano’s 32^nd with Ford, placing him fourth on the manufacturers all-time wins list, while also marking his eighth season with multiple Cup Series victories. Logano opened the 400-mile event with a fourth-place finish in Stage 1 before handling issues in traffic throughout Stage 2 resulted in a 12^th-place result in the second segment. After restarting the final stage from 15^th, Logano was scored 18^th at the time of the caution on lap 175, prompting teams to hit pit road with the fuel window looming. Crew chief Paul Wolfe made the call for fuel only as the field lined up with 79 laps remaining, but another caution on lap 205 altered the strategy yet again as Logano was told to hold off on going hard until 10 laps to go. Logano found success running the top lane as he charged into the top-five with 27 to go before he was told he no longer needed to save fuel with 14 laps left, allowing him to jump to fourth on the leaderboard prior to a caution for debris with 11 to go. Logano lined up from the outside of row two for the ensuing restart and worked his way to the front with teammate Ryan Blaney on his back bumper as the two navigated three-wide battles prior to the caution with two laps remaining, setting up a green-white-checkered finish. Logano and Blaney lined up as the first two cars on the inside row coming to the green with teammates in the Nos. 99 and 1 lined up on the front of the outside row, but the Team Penske duo prevailed as the Autotrader Ford cleared the No. 99 heading into turn one on the white flag lap and kept it out front the rest of the way, culminating in Logano’s second points-paying win of the 2024 season and second-career victory at Atlanta (2022 Spring). Logano’s 34^th-career Cup Series victory moves him into a tie for 25^th on the series’ all-time wins list with Kurt Busch and Martin Truex Jr.

“They just give me really fast cars on superspeedways and we always find ourselves towards the front of them, we just end up wrecking more times than not. So, to be able to finally capitalize on a fast race car and win here in Atlanta again, I lived right over there in condo 805 for a long time, waking up dreaming of just racing on this racetrack, so pulling into Victory Lane here is always a special one. We had such a really good team here today. It’s awesome to get Autotrader into Victory Lane and the JL Kids Crew are here today, so it’s really cool to finally win with them here. We all talked about how wild card this round could be. We knew that the Penske cars would be strong on the superspeedway style type racetracks. We’ve been all year long. Unfortunately we’ve been caught up in every possible wreck on these type of tracks. It’s nice to finally capitalize on the laps led, being towards the front, having a teammate lined up behind me there. He scored a ton of points today, too, being up there. A good day for Team Penske all the way through. A really special day for Penske to be able to score some good points and set themselves up pretty good for the Round of 12.”

WHAT’S NEXT: The NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs continues the Round of 16 at Watkins Glen International on Sunday, September 15. Coverage of the Go Bowling at The Glen begins at 3 p.m. ET on USA, MRN, and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio Channel 90.