Team Penskes Missed Opportunities: Dominance without victory in 2025

Today at 01:35 PM

For the second consecutive week, the NASCAR Cup Series has produced three-wide racing and a thrilling finish — with Joe Gibbs Racing‘s Christopher Bell taking a dramatic last lap overtime victory on the Atlanta Motor Speedway high banks.

It was a can-do answer to the season-opening DAYTONA 500 thriller a week ago when Hendrick Motorsports‘ William Byron became only the fifth driver in the celebrated race‘s 67-year history to win back-to-back trophies.

Bell‘s answer Sunday night at Atlanta marked his first ever NASCAR Cup Series victory in a drafting-style track and the two dramatic season-opening weekends bode well for this weekend‘s highly-anticipated road course race, the EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix at Circuit of The Americas in Austin, Texas (Sunday at 3:30 p.m. ET on FOX, PRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

One of the season‘s early common themes is a late race rush for the trophy — and missed opportunity for each race‘s most prolific organization, Team Penske. The three Penske drivers — reigning and three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Joey Logano, 2023 series champ Ryan Blaney and 2022 DAYTONA 500 winner Austin Cindric — have combined to lead 334 of the 467 laps run to date.

That‘s an absolutely dominant 72 percent of all laps in 2025.

Yet the kind of unpredictable drafting competition failed to produce a trophy for the dominant trio.

“As a team, as Fords, we had the best cars here this weekend,” said Cindric, whose 47 laps out front in the No. 2 Team Penske Ford at Atlanta were second only to Logano‘s race best 83 laps led.

"We put ourselves into position to win the race and got used up and into the fence and didn‘t win the race. It‘s a shame. Two weeks in a row I feel like we have had the car to beat and haven‘t done it. One way or another, it is disappointing."

That‘s putting it mildly for these three.

Despite his laps led total, Cindric finished 28th at Atlanta, nine laps down, after being collected in a late-race incident while running among the top-five. At Daytona, he led a race best 59 laps, but finished eighth.

Logano leads the series with 126 laps led in the two races, including a race best 83 laps out front at Atlanta only to finish 12th. At Daytona, his No. 22 Team Penske Ford led 43 laps but crashed out and took a 35th-place finish for his effort.

Blaney put his No. 12 Team Penske Ford Mustang on pole position at Atlanta, but led only a single lap there as Cindric — who started alongside him on the front row — took the top spot immediately. Still Blaney, who spun after contact with second-year driver Carson Hocevar, finished a team best fourth-place.

The big upside for the popular former champ is that his Atlanta showing combined with his seventh place finish at Daytona — including 23 laps led — has put him into the NASCAR Cup Series championship lead by 12 points over Byron.

"It was a good comeback,” Blaney acknowledged. "I just fell back from getting spun there and I was able to pick our way through and ended up scrounging a good finish out of it.

"It was a little bit of a struggle getting to the front after I lost some track position in the first and second stage, and then we got spun by the 77 [Hocevar] when I finally got track position and we were able to make it back up and run forward, so it was an up and down day, that‘s for sure. I‘m happy we were able to make a recovery."

Although the finishes have been frustrating for a team that has dominated the opening two races, the good news is that they arrive in Austin this week, the odds-on favorites once again. The three drivers are some of the series‘ best on road courses and the world-renowned COTA circuit absolutely gives them another prime opportunity to reverse missed opportunity, seize on the season‘s mastery to date.

Logano scored a road course win at Watkins Glen, N.Y. in 2015 and has a career best third-place showing at COTA in 2021, where he led 14 of the 54 laps.

Cindric has five NASCAR Xfinity Series road course wins on five different tracks and is widely considered to be one of the very best road course drivers in the sport. He has a pair of top-10 finishes in four COTA starts with a best showing of sixth-place in 2023.

Blaney has a win at the Charlotte ROVAL and won the pole position and finished a career best sixth-place at Austin in 2022.

William Byron is the defending COTA winner.

— NASCAR Wire Service —