It may not have been a win, but a fifth-place finish in Sunday’s (April 27) Jack Link’s 500 at Talladega Superspeedway was just the result Joey Logano and the No. 22 team desperately, desperately needed.
Sure, Logano’s scored the fifth-most stage points and ranks fourth in laps led among all NASCAR Cup Series drivers in 2025, but he and the No. 22 team haven’t been able to capitalize in any of the races they’ve shown race-winning speed. Talladega was just the second top 10 for Logano this season, and while it took 10 races, he finally had the first top five of his championship defense.
Key word being had. It stood for roughly two hours until it was scrubbed from the record books for a spoiler infraction in post-race inspection.
Team Penske elected not to appeal the disqualification, and Logano’s first top-15 finish at Talladega since 2021 instead turned into his first last-place finish since 2023. He’s still above the playoff cut line, but he now sits 10th in points after the 40-point reduction and has an average finish of 19.7 in 10 races.
Ouch.
There’s a cruel twist of irony from Talladega, as Sunday was the first Talladega race in years where Logano ran a clean race and didn’t get caught up in some crash before the finish. But even a top five wasn’t enough to outrun the gloomy dark cloud that constantly rains on his parade at NASCAR’s fastest track.
It’s not like Logano has been terrible at Talladega, however. He’s a three-time winner at the track, and he’s still one of the most familiar faces you’ll see at the front of the field in this car. In fact, he leads all drivers in laps led at Talladega with the Next Gen car (117), with 113 coming in the last four races.
But it’s all that time out front that makes Logano’s Talladega record in the Next Gen car all the more jarring. In his last seven starts at the 2.66-mile oval, he has an average finish of 29.1, with only one finish better than 23rd and four finishes of 30th or worse.
That average finish is dead last among drivers that have competed in all seven Talladega Cup races since 2022, and it ranks 29th of the 30 drivers to run at least six of the seven. Even BJ McLeod and JJ Yeley — who typically compete in open, underfunded cars — finish better on average than the No. 22 car.
And while superspeedways are the lottery tracks of the Cup schedule, no one who has dominated as much as Logano has done so little at the finish of these races.
Among the aforementioned 10 drivers that have led the most laps at Talladega with the Next Gen car, Logano is the only one without a top-10 finish and just one of two drivers (alongside Bubba Wallace) without a top five. His average finish is more than eight positions worse than Michael McDowell’s (the second worst of the group), and Logano’s average finish is more than triple that of William Byron’s.
Logano was a force to be reckoned with at Talladega in the Gen 6 car, but the Next Gen car has bewildered him at this track in year four. He’s notorious for being one of the most aggressive and fearless drivers on superspeedways, and while those traits were crucial to success at Gen 6 superspeedways, aggression is not as vital in Next Gen superspeedway racing, which has transformed into a calculated strategy match so long as the cars are stuck running 190-mph pace laps at full throttle.
Whether it’s a combination of bad luck or the drastic changes to superspeedway racing with this car (and it most likely is a combination of both), there’s always a chance for a superspeedway driver as good as Logano to turn his luck around. But it’s a long six months until the series returns to Talladega in the fall, and the DQ wiped away any goodwill Sunday’s race would’ve provided.
Stephen Stumpf is the NASCAR Content Director for Frontstretch and is a three-year veteran of the site. His weekly column is “Stat Sheet,” and he formerly wrote "4 Burning Questions" for three years. He also writes commentaries, contributes to podcasts, edits articles and is frequently at the track for on-site coverage.
Find Stephen on Twitter @stephen_stumpf