How Team Penske has given order to the chaos of the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs

The 2024 motorsport season has been a decorated one for Team Penske, with an Indy 500 victory paired with championships in IMSA, WEC, and NASCAR.

But Joey Logano’s win at Phoenix Raceway made it three Cup Series titles in a row for the legacy team run by Roger Penske — proving that the outfit has truly mastered the NASCAR Playoffs format.

Team Penske has mastered the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs

Joey Logano shouldn’t have won the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series championship — but he did, because Team Penske has mastered the playoffs format.

Most motorsport championships are decided at the end of the season based on the cumulative number of points scored over the duration of a race season. The driver with the most points wins the title — and sometimes, a driver’s dominance is so great that he’s able to take the title early, with races remaining.

In a bid to guarantee excitement until the very final lap of the season, NASCAR instituted an elimination-style Playoffs format. Here, the season is split into two sections: the regular season, and the playoffs.

In the regular season, drivers compete for wins and points. A win locks you into the playoffs, but if you score enough points, you can qualify for the playoffs that way.

When the regular season ends, in comes the playoffs, where the 16 drivers to have qualified for the post-season compete through a series of eliminations in hopes of being there at the very end. Every three races, the lowest-scoring four drivers are knocked out of the running, whittling the field down further and further.

Coming into the final race, four drivers have their points wiped clean, allowing them to compete on equal terms for a championship. The driver who finishes highest on the track becomes the champion.

Understanding the NASCAR Playoffs:

👉 NASCAR Playoffs explained: Format, rules, tracks, and schedule

👉 2024 NASCAR Playoffs: Who made the Cup Series cut, and what to expect from the postseason

The Playoffs format has drawn ample criticism from fans because, ultimately, it doesn’t reward consistency. A back-of-the-field driver like Harrison Burton, for example, can earn a slot in the Playoffs for winning just one race. He can hold on throughout the Playoffs, too — he just can’t be one of the four lowest-scoring drivers in that round.

Perhaps no champion epitomizes that lack of consistency quite like Logano.

Logano kicked off the 2024 season on the back foot, and his performance fluctuated wildly all year long. One win in the regular season qualified him for the Playoffs, and two wins in the Playoffs kept his championship hopes afloat just long enough to earn him a slot in the Championship 4.

The result? The No. 22 Team Penske driver clocked an average finishing position of 17.11 — earning him the distinction of being the NASCAR Cup Series Champion with the worst average finish in series history.

Adding insult to injury, Logano was also knocked out of the Playoffs earlier this year before being added back in — making him the first driver to do so since the introduction of eliminations.

(At Talladega, Logano was wiped out in a massive crash. His low finishing position thus meant that he was knocked out of the Playoffs… until fellow competitor Alex Bowman was disqualified from the race at the Charlotte Roval for failing post-race tech inspection. That decision brought Logano back into the Championship fold.)

All things considered, Logano probably shouldn’t have won the 2024 Cup Series title. But he did, and it’s because his Penske team has mastered this format.

Team Penske has won the last three Cup titles: In 2022 and 2024 with Logano, and 2023 with Ryan Blaney. Logano and Penske also won the 2018 title, giving the team some serious accolades with a format that has only existed for 11 years.

One of the early 2024 storylines centered around Ford, the manufacturer that provides Penske with its machinery, and its seeming lack of speed. The cars were alright, but seemed to struggle with reliability and full-race pace. The very fact that two Fords made it into the Championship 4 would have seemed unthinkable at the start of the year — especially considering the pace of drivers like Kyle Larson and Denny Hamlin.

The two Fords that made it into the final four? They were Penske Fords.

NASCAR introduced the Playoff format to generate excitement and unpredictability. Penske has instead turned that chaos into order.

But what does it take to master the elimination-style title format? Penske has seemed to realize that consistency is far less important than simply being really damn good when it counts.

To qualify for the Playoffs, or to advance to the next round, all you need to do is win one race or be just a little better than the other guys. If you have an off weekend, so be it, even in the rapid-fire post-season, there’s still a chance to find success at the next race. And if you can’t find success, well — just hope someone else is worse.

Team Penske’s performance in 2024 rose massively in the latter part of the season, which is exactly when it counts the most. Both Logano and Blaney were able to sneak in two critical wins when they most needed to advance, and Blaney in particular was decently reliable when he wasn’t being knocked out in a crash.

Their competition was less impressive. William Byron snuck into the Championship 4 by the skin of his teeth (and a penalty for competitor Christopher Bell). Tyler Reddick was on track to be knocked out of contention until a win at Homestead guaranteed him a shot in Phoenix. Neither driver had quite the same kind of pace as the Penske Fords.

Of course, “doing just well enough until a win is absolutely necessary” is a risky strategy in the ever-chaotic Cup championship — and that could be where Roger Penske’s experience comes in.

Penske, at 87 years of age, has been in the motorsport business for longer than most race fans have been alive. His leadership skills have been honed for decades, and his resumé includes everything from Formula 1 to IndyCar to the World Endurance Championship to NASCAR.

Alongside driver and engineer Mark Donohue, Penske was at the very cutting edge of the racing scene in the 1960s and 1970s, as the two men strove to find the “unfair advantage” — or, the completely legal trick that would allow them to find a margin over the competition.

The NASCAR rulebook is much more rigid than it was in the past, which means Penske’s modern “unfair advantage” has to come in the form of leadership and strategy. He has to be able to understand the format of the championship in which his team competes, and he has to find a way to master it. And in 2024, he’s shown that he’s transformed his team into an efficient race-winning operation in the Cup Series.

Logano and Blaney are drivers with a temper, the kind of competitors who were once prone to silly mistakes and hot-headed moves when the going got tough. In racing at Penske, both drivers have smoothed those tempers over — at least just long enough to keep themselves in championship contention. The format doesn’t require a great race every weekend; it just needs them to make it to the next stage.

And that’s exactly the kind of behavior the Playoffs rewards. NASCAR may have been looking to shake up the running order with the elimination format, but it didn’t take long for Team Penske to understand how to make the most of that format and form strategies that take that chaos into consideration.

Joey Logano probably shouldn’t have won the NASCAR Cup Series championship — but he did, and it’s thanks to the way he’s been able to put Penske’s strategies into action.

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