Kevin Harvick does not think Joey Logano’s No. 22 team looks like a championship threat right now. He said the team is probably in the worst spot of the contenders, with the expectations of racing for a title and the burden of sitting outside the postseason picture.
Harvick also left room for a rebound, saying the team might still make the Chase and could turn its season around. But his bottom line was blunt: he does not see Logano contending for the championship as the 2026 Cup Series season heads deeper into summer.
That warning lands on a difficult stretch for Logano, 35, a three-time champion and the defending 2024 Cup Series champion. He has gone a year without a win in the NASCAR Cup Series, a drought that dates back to May last year. Through 12 starts in 2026, his best finishes were third at Daytona and third at Martinsville, but consistency has been the bigger problem. He was 18th in the standings, two spots below the 16 postseason Championship Chase places, and he failed to finish inside the top 30 in the last four races. Half of his starts this season ended 30th or worse.
Before the Watkins Glen race, Logano sounded like a driver trying to talk himself through the grind. “It’s not far off of where we’ve been in the past,” he said, before adding, “You just keep grinding. What are you supposed to do? You can’t quit.” He followed with, “You’ve got to keep pushing through.”
He did not pretend the slump was easy. “It’s a long season, a long way to go. Yeah, it’s been tough — I can’t hide from that. It’s frustrating; it’s hard. I’ve also been here before,” he said. That matters because his championship resume was built in NASCAR’s previous win-and-you’re-in format, while the current system rewards consistency more than the old one. Right now, the numbers are working against him more than his name or his history can help.
Still, Logano pointed to one race where the speed was there, even if the result was not. He said the car was fast at Texas and, on the last run before a pit-road wreck, “arguably the fastest car” as he tried to work through the field. “I felt good about that. There are some positives to take out of all those things. So you look at that, learn from the mistakes, and you move on,” he said.
That is the tension inside the No. 22 camp: the pace has appeared in flashes, but the finish has not followed. Logano said the team was already in a mode of trying to maximize every race, and that often means thinking beyond stage points and toward the biggest possible haul. “You have to look at any of these races these days like, ‘OK, how do you maximize your day?’ Is that by finishing well or creating the most points possible? Sometimes, that means giving up a stage to get the most points possible just depending on where you’re at,” he said.
For Logano, the next stretch is about converting those flashes into actual results before the standings make the math even harder. For Harvick, the question is whether the No. 22 team can climb back into the Chase at all. For Logano, the answer has to start with a finish that finally matches the speed he keeps talking about.
