Joey Logano is 71 points behind championship leader Kyle Larson with five Chase races remaining, but in his mind, he is not out of this fight.
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Logano sees a path forward for the No. 22 team. He believes that he and Team Penske have some great tracks coming up, which will help overcome this deficit or a potentially larger one after this weekend's race at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
"It's hard for me to say 80 points out is a really good spot, but I would say that we're still in contention considering the tracks that are coming our way," Logano said on Wednesday.
"You think of Phoenix and Martinsville, and Talladega can go either way. There are moments where we've done spectacular there and you can get caught up in a wreck just as quickly.
"When I look at those three tracks in particular, those can really change some things around. We know exactly what a win is worth. We know if you score stage points in the top two or three in each stage and win a race, you cut into that deficit quite a bit. You can gain 30 points on the whole field."
Larson has built a large lead in the Chase standings by winning two races and posting an average finish of 2.2 in the five races completed thus far. He and the No. 5 team appear to be the second coming of Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus with how they have performed under pressure.
Logano and the No. 22 team have run well. They have a win and an average finish of 8.6. They just haven't been as consistent as the No. 5 team.
Still, Logano doesn't see this perfection continuing through the final five weeks of the Chase. He believes that the No. 5 team will face some adversity, just like many other teams in the history of NASCAR. He also says that it's up to the other teams to expose any weaknesses. that exist on the No. 5 team.
Of course, proving that Larson and Cliff Daniels are "human" is only one of the side missions for Team Penske. The story quest is to just go out and win at tracks where Logano, Paul Wolfe, and the No. 22 team have excelled in the past.
They can stack bonus points by winning races, and they can quickly chase down Larson even if the two-time champion continues to run well.
"Even if the guy finishes second, you still are gonna gain 25 or so points at least," Logano said. "If you can string a couple of those together, yeah, you're right there. I think in our case we have to win one of them at least to be able to say we're gonna go up there and beat them.
"We're gonna have to win one if not two, and if we don't win two, then we're gonna have to - not that you hope for bad things to happen to people, but you've got to hope for some misfortune a little bit from the competitors."
