Joey Logano and the No. 22 Shell-Pennzoil team executed a nearly flawless race, but lacked the overall speed to contend for the win on Saturday night at Texas Motor Speedway, coming home third in the Duck Commander 500. The start of the event was delayed nearly two hours by persistent rain showers during the afternoon and evening. When the race finally began, Logano settled into third and ran solidly in the top five for the first 50 laps. With no rubber on the track early on, Logano fought a tight condition that eventually worked its way to being too loose. Crew chief Todd Gordon made several good adjustments to the Shell-Pennzoil Ford Fusion to help get the handle right throughout the event. Logano slipped to the back half of the top 10 through the middle portion of the event until the pit crew performed a couple of blazing stops to get him back inside the top five. A great restart on the outside lane with 100 laps to go moved Logano into the top three, a position he would occupy for the rest of the race. Running in the second spot, while on fresh Goodyear tires late in the race, Logano began to chase race leader Kyle Busch down, but eventually lost a little bit of handling and surrendered the second spot to Dale Earnhardt Jr. At the finish of the 334-lap event, Logano found himself third, his third top-five finish of the season. Logano remains fifth in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series point standings, 25 points behind Busch.
“I’m proud of what my race team did. This Shell-Pennzoil team executed perfectly today. We may not have had the fastest car – we obviously didn’t have the fastest car – but we executed into a top-three finish and I’m very proud of my team for that. We had great pit stops and great calls, so everything worked out well. Everyone did their job. That’s kind of been our weak point this year is that we haven’t had the speed, but we haven’t been executing perfectly. Now it seemed like we executed right and we’ve got to work on our speed now.”