by Patrick Zier | Aug 21, 2026 |
Joey Logano has been on a tear lately, Ford’s version of Denny Hamlin, if you will. Heading into this weekend’s race at New Hampshire, Logano has won two of the last four races, both on short tracks, and finished third in another, this at Indianapolis.
In fact, all the Penske Fords have come to life over the last five races. Ryan Blaney, Austin Cindric and Josh Berry, who drives the Wood Brothers Ford prepared by Penske, have all added top five finishes, the best showing by Penske this year.
All told and not counting superspeedways, Penske has only 11 top fives this season, so getting six in a five-race stretch is pretty impressive, What that means, though, in terms of the rapidly approaching playoffs, is anybody’s guess because Toyota is still the elephant in the room.
Even Logano, famous – or infamous – for his late season surges which have led to championships in 2022 and 2024, admits Toyota, and particularly the Joe Gibbs Racing fearsome foursome of Hamlin, Christopher Bell, Chase Briscoe and Ty Gibbs, have an advantage.
After edging Briscoe at Richmond last Saturday, Logano was bluntly honest. “He (Briscoe) was faster,” Logano said after the race according to essentiallysports.com.
In fact Briscoe thought his competition would come from Bell, not Briscoe. “I was like ‘Okay, I’m gonna be okay, I just got to pass the 20 (Bell)’, he said. “Then he (Briscoe) kind of took off there.”
“It’s just typical late summer Joey Logano, just coming up out of nowhere on you,” runner-up Briscoe said according to NASCAR’s website. “So yeah, just go on to the next one and see what we can do.”
Still, as shown by the Old Guy Sport competition index, Penske, and especially Logano, have started to flex their muscles in the last five races.
Over that span, Logano has scored 166 points, more than anybody, with Blaney adding 56, Cindric 33 and Berry 20 for a team total of 275.
For JGR, Bell has 138, Hamlin 117, Briscoe 110 and Gibbs 90. That makes their team total an impressive 455. Trailing, and trailing badly, are the four Hendrick Chevys. William Byron, with just 35 points, is the leader. Alex Bowman has 10, Kyle Larson four and Chase Elliott one, giving Hendrick a team total of just 50.
Hendrick has spent the entire season trying to figure out the brand new Chevy and it hasn’t been able to do it. And if it hasn’t got it figured out by now, it’s hard to see how anything will change the rest of the way.
Larson, the defending Cup champion, has all but given up. “None of us might seem confident as far as winning a championship, but there is still that confidence that, because you’re racing for Hendrick Motorsports, you know at any point we can turn it around,” Larson told journalist Tim Moore as reported by essentiallysports.com.
Still, Logano seems to be the only outsider who has any chance of disrupting what looks to be an unstoppable Toyota run to the title. “It’s nice to see we’ve made quite a recovery, and, like I said, change our goals at this point in the season,” Logano commented according to NASCAR’s website.
“We’ve got a legit shot at winning the championship now,” Logano continued. “We’re getting hot at the right time. It will be a fun chase till the end. I’m proud of everyone sticking together. These are the times it’s hard to do that, the times you see teams break. It wouldn’t take much longer running the way we were running until something was going to break (on our team),” he added.
“Is anybody surprised?” teammate Blaney, who won a championship himself in 2023 to give Penske three of the last four, asked. “I’ve had to see it all year,” He continued according to NASCAR’s website.
“It’s like ‘Oh, the 22 team (Logano) isn’t running where they should.’ “I’m just like, in my mind, ‘just wait, they’re going to be someone you have to race with for sure,'” Blaney commented. “It’s no surprise to me they’ve gotten back to form in the last month or so.”
Still, it’s hard to see Logano getting there. He, and the Penske team in general, have had their best runs on short tracks, and there are only three short tracks on the 10-race chase schedule. Six are on intermediate tracks and one is on a superspeedway.
And Penske hasn’t figured out how to make its cars competitive on intermediate ovals. According to the Old Guy Sport competition index, in the 10 intermediate races so far, Penske has just 82 points including 31 for Logano. That compares with 799 for JGR which includes 419 for Hamlin.
And if you want to throw in Hendrick, which is running much better on the intermediate ovals than Penske, Hamlin’s 419 still tops Hendrick’s entire team total of 399.
So for Logano – and anybody else looking to topple Toyota and Hamlin – winning a championship seems to be the impossible dream, even though NASCAR’s point system, which is designed to keep as many cars competitive for as long as possible, will do everything it can to bring him back to the pack.
NASCAR NOTES
Three most likely winners at New Hampshire: 1-Christopher Bell, 2-Ryan Blaney, 3-Denny Hamlin. Last year’s winner at New Hampshire: Blaney. Top five at New Hampshire last year: 1-Blaney, 2-Josh Berry, 3-William Byron, 4-Joey Logano, 5-Chase Elliott.
Last week’s Old Guy Sport Richmond picks: 1-Bell, 2-Hamlin, 3-Blaney. Richmond winner: Logano. OGS season record: 10-10.(superspeedways are not included in OGS picks).
OGS competition index top 10 after Richmond: 1-Hamlin 565, 2-Bell 371, 3-Tyler Reddick 344, 4-Chase Briscoe 312, 5-Ty Gibbs 295, 6-Kyle Larson 270, 7-Shane van Gisbergen 223, 8-Blaney 213, 9-Logano 208, 10-Elliott 182.
OGS competition index top 10 on short tracks (tracks most like New Hampshire): 1-Logano 177, 2-Gibbs 169, 3-Blaney 168, 4-Hamlin 146, 5-Bell 119, 6-Briscoe 101, 7-Larson 83, 8-Elliott 72, 9-Austin Cindric 30, 10-Reddick 21.
by Patrick Zier | Aug 15, 2026 |
Denny Hamlin looked like he had just been in a heavyweight title fight – and lost. You don’t see that often in Hamlin. After a race, he usually looks like he could climb back in his car and terrify the competition for another 400 laps, 500 laps, whatever.
But not this time. Not after last week’s race at Iowa, where it was all he could do to make it through the 350 laps. Hamlin was beat. He looked every bit the 45-year-old driver he has become. He looked, well, human. He is not, in fact, Superman.
After it was over, and Hamlin had somehow clawed his way to a fifth place finish after being forced to start in the back of the pack, his team owner, Joe Gibbs, made an observation.
“I want to say this,” Gibbs said according to NASCAR’s website, nascar.com. “I’ve never seen Denny that exhausted. He got out of that car, and he was sitting there on pit wall, I think he was so nervous – we all were – about the brakes, and it just put a lot of pressure on him. I think he drove his heart out.”
All weekend, Hamlin had been involved in a brake controversy with NASCAR. JGR engineers and team analytics had come up with a plan, that, in theory, would help Hamlin’s car corner faster. It involved putting different kinds of brake pads on each wheel.
But, as is so often the case in NASCAR, what looked good on paper didn’t work on the track. The brake pads started coming apart which caused the brake rotors to fail which allowed air bubbles into the brake line which caused the brakes to lose pressure which meant racing with no brakes.
So Hamlin went to NASCAR. The brake pads need to be replaced, he said. The car is undrivable. No, NASCAR said. We don’t want teams using one set of brake pads for qualifying and another for the race.
“I told them I’d start the race on pit lane,” Hamlin said according to nascar.com. “I told them we have a major problem.” But NASCAR stood firm, and when Hamlin’s team made adjustments to the cooling system to try and help with the brakes, NASCAR sent Hamlin to the back of the field to start the race.
But this is not really a story about brakes. It’s a cautionary tale. Even with all of that, Hamlin managed to finish fifth. And Chase Briscoe, in another JGR Toyota that had similar brake problems, was sixth. And Ty Gibbs, in yet another JGR Toyota, won the race. And Christopher Bell in – you guessed it – another JGR Toyota, was second.
Which leads us to this question. If Ford and Chevy can’t even beat the Toyota’s when they’re running bad, how the hell are they going to beat them when they’re running good?
If you had a system that was designed to determine a true champion, No way. But NASCAR’s point system was never designed to determine a true champion. It was always designed to keep as many cars in contention for as long as possible.
And that carries over into this year’s new 10-race playoff, which at least ends the knockout system, where head-to-head racing eliminated the loser and which cost Hamlin the championship last year, to a system where the driver with the most points after the final 10 races wins the title.
But again, the regular season means virtually nothing because when the playoffs start, the points will be adjusted to bring all the contenders closer together to give all 16 cars more of a chance, and the NASCAR point system is a joke anyway because you don’t get points for competing, you get points for finishing, so anything can happen.
Still, using the Old Guy Sport competition index, which rewards racing, top five finishes and leading laps under green instead of just finishing races, three Toyotas, the two JGR cars driven by Hamlin (545 points) and Bell (367), plus the 23XI Toyota driven by Tyler Reddick (343), have clearly separated themselves from the rest.
And there are even more Toyotas in the next group, JGR’s Gibbs (295 points) and Briscoe (252) separated by Hendrick’s Kyle Larson (270). So, the question becomes not if a Toyota will win, but WHICH Toyota will win. And if one of them doesn’t, it’s another black eye for NASCAR.
NASCAR NOTES
Three most likely winners at Richmond: 1-Christopher Bell, 2-Denny Hamlin, 3-Ryan Blaney. Last year’s winner at Richmond: Austin Dillon. Top five at Richmond last year: 1-Dillon, 2-Alex Bowman, 3-Blaney, 4-Joey Logano, 5-Austin Cindric.
Last week’s OGS Iowa picks: 1-Ty Gibbs, 2-Hamlin, 3-Kyle Larson. Iowa winner: Gibbs. OGS season record after 19 races (OGS does not count the superspeedway races at Daytona, Talladega and Atlanta) 10-9.
OGS competition index top 10 after 19 races: 1-Hamlin 545 points, 2-Bell 367, 3-Tyler Reddick 343, 4-Gibbs 295, 5-Larson 270, 6-Chase Briscoe 252, 7-Shane van Gisbergen 223, 8-Blaney 203, 9-Chase Elliott 182, 10-Logano 147.
OGS competition index top 10 on short tracks (tracks most similar to Richmond): 1-Gibbs 169, 2-Blaney 158, 3-Hamlin 126, 4-Logano 116, 5-Bell 115, 6-Larson 83, 7-Elliott 62, 8-Briscoe 41, 9-Reddick 20, 10-van Gisbergen 15.
by Patrick Zier | Aug 9, 2026 |
TAMPA – There might be a time when South Florida Coach Brian Hartline would be willing to discuss the future of college football and what that means for the Bulls, or whether or not we are moving away from up-tempo offenses. But now is not that time.
Hartline briefed the media last week as USF began fall practice, and it was a brief briefing. Because right now, right then, it didn’t matter that much to Hartline.
He has a particular way of compartmentalizing things in his mind, of deciding what’s important at a particular time and place and then running with it. And right now, making sure his football team knows exactly what’s expected of it every day, every practice, has his full attention. The media doesn’t figure into that.
So, he deflects questions he doesn’t consider important. For example, what will USF’s offense look like? Is there a trend now to get back to more basic football? Have defenses forced change because they’re catching up with the up-tempo offenses?
“Well, we’re gonna do what we’re gonna do,” Hartline responded. “I think that our track record is pretty well defined. So what they’ve done in the past year, I’m really not concerned about. We’re just going to do things that we know of winning football teams.”
Okay, but what does that even mean? When he answers, Hartline sometimes sounds a little bit dismissive of questions that don’t fit his football framework, the things that are foremost in his mind.
“The guys that win championships, you’ll find a lot of similarities in the types of offenses,” Hartline continued. “Whoever won the conference championship here (in the American Conference) and whoever won on a national level, it was a pretty consistent M.O.
“We’ll do a good job of of identifying what our guys do best and we’ll really lean into that. To really label us in a certain way is not how my mind works,” Hartline added. “We’ll continue to do what our guys do best and continue to enhance from there.”
Hartline is not anti-media. He was extremely expressive and engaging at the American Conference media days. His mind was obviously geared to working with the media at that particular event. That was their time.
Now though, his focus is not on press conferences. It’s on what his team needs to accomplish in that day’s practice and how he can build on that the next day. Explaining his offense to the media is not relevant.
Hartline has put himself in a rather difficult position as he begins his first season as USF’s head coach and his first season as a head coach anywhere.
In July, as reported on On3, he insinuated that his predecessor, Alex Golesh, had fallen short at USF. “There was some success here the last couple of years, but nowhere near where it should be,” Hartline said on On3.
“The expectation should be to win – the floor here should be a constant chase for the American Conference championship.”
In reality, Golesh kept USF football from disintegrating. Like Hartline, it was his first job as a head coach. And again like Hartline, he had been the offensive coordinator at a Power Four powerhouse (Tennessee, Hartline had been the offensive coordinator at Ohio State) and had a solid background in the sport.
But when Golesh took over, the USF program was in total disarray. USF was coming off a 1-11 season. It had only won four games in the previous three years.
Golesh’s fast paced, up-tempo offense immediately changed that. In his first two years, Golesh’s teams compiled 7-6 records and went to bowls. Last season, Golesh finished 9-3 and was arguably one win away from making the College Football Playoffs.
So, there’s pressure on Hartline to take the next step. Clearly, he is confident the can do that.
In college football now, there is little carryover from one year to the next.
With the transfer portal and NIL, rosters turn over every year, particularly in the Group of Six. So Hartline has a new team. His team. And he must win. He must contend for the American Conference championship quickly, and he must win it. That’s the bar he has set for himself.
He has said USF has everything it needs to make its mark at the sport’s highest levels. Failure is not an option, not for him, or this program. If he can’t get it done, USF will become irrelevant in the big scheme of things. And so will he.
by Patrick Zier | Aug 4, 2026 |
Toyota is the King Kong of NASCAR. It stands astride the Cup series, clutching Ford in one gigantic hand and Chevy in the other and nobody knows when it will let go. Or if it will let go.
Toyota’s dominance is indisputable. It is crushing the competition everywhere and particularly on the intermediate size tracks, NASCAR’s bread and butter, where it appears unchallengeable.
So, how did we get here? What happened to make one brand that much better then the rest? When the Next Gen car was introduced in 2022, NASCAR put the screws to anybody messing with it. About all the teams could do was put it together. Hands off.
But they quickly noticed that one of the biggest differences between the Next Gen car and its predecessors was that it totally flipped the downforce equation.
In the past, downforce was achieved by stopping air from getting under the car, where it tended to cause lift, and using airflow over and around the body to create grip.
Now, the idea was to let the air get underneath and guide it along the underwing, a smooth metal plate that covered the bottom of the car. A diffuser was used to regulate the air flow and speed it up, which sucked the car down.
The diffuser had metal fins which created channels to move the air out the back of the car, and they were supposed to remain rigid at all times.
But when NASCAR allowed Ford and Chevy to upgrade their cars, they installed carbon-fiber fins that were rigid when the car was stationary but ‘fluttered’ when it was in motion, increasing downforce and causing a swirling mass of air to hit the car behind them.
That destroyed the aerodynamic balance of the trailing car and prevented it from passing.
This year, NASCAR mandated that the fins remain rigid when the car was in motion, and while that’s not the only reason the Chevys and Fords are not competitive; their updated bodies have not worked on the track, it impacted their aerodynamics. And finding the correct front to rear balance has been a real struggle for both brands.
Jeff Andrews, president and general manager of Hendrick Motorsports, Chevy’s premier team, agreed. “It takes months to get everything working together,” Andrews was quoted on racer.com, “because if you take a setup from 2024 or 2025 and roll into Atlanta, Chicago or Charlotte, that won’t work now.
“The downforce is different on top of the car, the percentage from front to rear and side, you have to get all those things to work in cohesion again. It’s almost like building a new notebook,” Andrews added.
Ford is in even rougher shape then Chevy. In fact, the performance of Team Penske, Ford’s leading team, has deteriorated so much in the Next Gen era that it is no longer an elite organization.
On the other hand, when Toyota updated its cars, it did a much better job of improving its aero package than either Ford or Chevy, and it had never installed the carbon-fiber fins in the diffuser, so that was not an issue as it was with the other brands. All that appears to have given Toyota an edge.
The Old Guy Sport competition index shows just how big of an advantage Toyota has, and it appears to be growing each year. While this is not evident in the NASCAR standings for many reasons, it really shows how irrelevant and meaningless the NASCAR standings are when it comes to determining who is truly competitive.
After 18 races in 2025(OGS does not count superspeedway races at Daytona, Talladega and Atlanta) including 10 on intermediate tracks and before NASCAR changed the rules governing the rear diffuser, the OGS competition index showed Joe Gibbs Racing with 1144 points including 498 on intermediate ovals.
Hendrick Motorsports had 867 points with 496 on intermediate tracks, indicating it was competitive with JGR on those ovals. Where it fell off last year was on short tracks. Meanwhile, Penske had just 422 points, with most of those coming on intermediate ovals where it had 367.
But once NASCAR put in the new diffuser rules this year, the Chevy and Ford numbers cratered. Again, this was clearly not the only reason Chevy and Ford fell behind, Toyota simply has a much better Cup racing program now than either Chevy or Ford, but, especially for Ford, which had the same body style it had in 2025, it’s hard to explain the fall off.
As the Cup series heads for Iowa this weekend and after the same number of races, 18, as last year and again with 10 on intermediate ovals, Ford is struggling competitively.
Penske goes into Iowa with just 317 points and only 82 in intermediate tracks, while JGR has a whopping 1,342 including 799 on intermediate ovals. For perspective, Toyota now has more points, by a large margin, than Penske’s entire total for 2025, which was 888. And it’s very close to Hendrick’s 2025 total of 1,412. Hendrick has also fallen off, with 602 overall and 388 on intermediate ovals so far this year.
Kyle Larson, who is the only driver to break through the Toyota onslaught in 2026, praised Hendrick’s efforts. “It’s been a tough year and a lot of hard work to this point,” Larson commented according to racer.com.
“I think there’s still a lot to be learned with this body. I know it doesn’t seem like much on paper, probably, but finding the right balance has been difficult.”
The unspoken word here is that looking ahead, Toyota might run roughshod over the competition until Ford and Chevy get brand new cars, and nobody knows for sure when that will be. That’s not the real nightmare, though, because you have to remember, Toyota will get a new car, too.
NASCAR NOTES
Three most likely winners at Iowa: 1-Ty Gibbs, 2-Denny Hamlin, 3-Kyle Larson. Last year’s winner at Iowa: William Byron. Top five at Iowa last Year: 1- Byron, 2-Chase Briscoe, 3-Brad Keselowski, 4-Ryan Blaney, 5-Ryan Preece.
OGS Indy picks: 1-Hamlin, 2-Christopher Bell, 3-Larson. Indy winner: Corey Heim. OGS season record: 9-9.
OGS competition index top 10 after 18 races: 1-Hamlin 535, 2-Tyler Reddick 343, 3-Bell 313, 4-Larson 270, 5-Briscoe 252, 6-Gibbs 242, 7-Shane van Gisbergen 223, 8-Chase Elliott 181, 9-Blaney 157, 10-Joey Logano 147.
OGS competition index top 10 on short tracks (tracks most like Iowa): 1-Hamlin 116, Gibbs 116, Logano 116, 4-Blaney 112, 5-Larson 83, 6-Bell 61, Elliott 61, 8-Briscoe 41, 9-Reddick 20, 10-van Gisbergen 15.
