Like It or Not, This Is What Penske Perfect Looks Like

As the man once said, “There’s an old saying in Tennessee – I know it is in Texas, probably in Tennessee – that says, ‘fool me once, shame, shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again.’”

I’ll admit – Team Penske had me fooled once. Way, way back in May, Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney and Austin Cindric were winless — two of them on the outside of the playoff cutline looking in — and RFK Racing appeared to have supplanted the group as Ford’s premier Cup Series team. 

From where I’m sitting in November, I’ll bet that’s exactly what they wanted us to think. Maybe Logano didn’t have a “championship-worthy” season in the eyes of the social-media commentariat, but the record books show that the Penske No. 22 won two titles in three years. Bring in teammate Ryan Blaney’s 2023 triumph (and this year’s runner-up result) and that suggests the NASCAR Cup Series playoff format is a solved game … and it’s Penske that solved it.

Playing tic-tac-toe? Put your “X” in the center square. Connect Four? Drop your first token down the middle. Ghost? Use a word from this list. Chasing a NASCAR Cup Series title? All you have to do is win any race before September, your strongest track in the Round of 8, and the Phoenix finale. The rest of the year, you can settle for good enough. 

Sure, Logano had an average finish (17.1) worse than Bubba Wallace (15.3), and would’ve ended up 12th in a season-long points format. But all that matters is it was good enough to bring Roger Penske a championship three-peat, and he’s the man who signs his paycheck.

The Nos. 2, 12 and 22 combined to win eight races in 2024, nine if you count the All-Star Race. With the exceptions of Pocono Raceway (Blaney) and Atlanta Motor Speedway (Logano), all came at low-banked short or intermediate circuits — the kind of tracks you’d happen to be best at if you strongly prioritized winning at Phoenix and Phoenix alone. 

Throughout the Gen 6 years, it seemed that regardless of track type, the Penske Fords were the class of the field at the drop of the green flag, but their rivals from Hendrick Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racing routinely outfoxed them with mid-race adjustments. In the Next Gen era, the Captain and his crew have taken that lesson to heart. On the scale of both races and seasons, these days the Penske cars are only fast once that pay window opens. With three years of evidence backing it up, I find it very hard to believe that’s a coincidence.

Roger Penske lives by the mantra “effort equals results.” Well, if you only need results three weeks of the year … why waste the effort?

I’m not falling for it again. Next year, when the Penske Fords are languishing mid-pack in the month of May, I’m not going to sound the alarm. When they roll off the hauler with speed on low-banked, mid-speed tracks like Nashville, St. Louis and Iowa, I’m going to recognize it for what it is: a master plan. A perfect season. A solved game.

In 2016, then-six-time champion Jimmie Johnson won the second race of the Cup Series season at Atlanta. He followed it up with a victory at Auto Club Speedway a couple of weeks later, then he and crew chief Chad Knaus basically dropped off the map until autumn. After pointing his way through the round of 12, Johnson won the opening races of each of the next two rounds and the season finale to claim a record-tying seventh championship. 

That offseason, NASCAR changed the points system, just as it had done after Johnson’s titles in 2010 and 2013, as well as after Matt Kenseth’s in 2003. Since then, we’ve had stages and playoff points encouraging drivers to fight up front in the early parts of each race and regular season – exactly when, you’ll notice, Penske has appeared weakest in the Next Gen era. 

Because NASCAR left a loophole. In those elimination rounds, playoff points only determine your fate if you don’t win a race – winning is still an automatic bye to the next round. So if you can win when you need to, playoff points don’t matter at all. They’re a distraction, one that the Penske teams have seen right through. 

There’s a hint of Moneyball about the whole thing. It’s against the spirit of the playoff system, if there ever were such a thing, and it’s also a bit of a gamble. But it’s a gamble that’s proven to pay off for Penske one hundred percent of the time. 

Ultimately, this big-brain strategy only works if you can count on the driver behind the wheel. You need someone who can win damn near on command. Not the flashiest driver, necessarily, nor the fastest. You need, in the words of Dale Earnhardt, “the one who refuses to lose.”

Logano wasn’t the best driver of 2024, by any means, but he was in the only races that mattered the most: Nashville, where the fuel should have run dry; Las Vegas, where Christopher Bell was the class of the field; Phoenix, where his teammate was faster and running him down in the closing laps. Logano refused to lose. Blaney’s growth over the last two years, from a driver who had routinely saw victories slip away to a driver capable of stealing them, puts him (literally) right in his teammate’s tire tracks. Only time will tell what Cindric is capable of. 

Whatever changes NASCAR makes to the format for ‘25 or ‘26 (and I’m sure they’re coming), you need to recognize. The first might be luck — the second, coincidence — but locking out the first three consecutive titles in the Next Gen era is the result of greatness. Just not necessarily the kind we’re used to.