Joey Logano has won two of the three most recent NASCAR Cup Series championships, and eight races into the 2025 season, he has been – for lack of a better word – invisible.
Logano has no wins and only one top 10 finish, an eighth place effort at Martinsville. He has led 260 laps, third most in the Cup Series, but the majority of them came in the back-to-back drafting races to start the year at Daytona International Speedway and Atlanta Motor Speedway, and then at Phoenix Raceway, when he took advantage of an alternate tire strategy
His best average running position was seventh at Atlanta and his best Driver Rating was a 105.9 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Most telling of all, however, isn't necessarily the fact that Logano has not performed like a championship-caliber driver thus far in 2025. It's the fact that the alarm bells one would expect to hear when the defending champion starts slow have not been sounding. Because for Logano, this is normal.
NASCAR's dynasties used to mean more
When Jimmie Johnson won five championships in a row and seven overall, anything less than multiple wins by this point in a season was considered grounds for full-blown panic. It seemed to be a narrative every single year when the cracks in the armor would show.
"What's wrong with the No. 48 team?"
"Is this finally the year?"
"Is Jimmie losing it?"
The answers, for the better part of a decade, would usually be "nothing, no, and no".
Even with the playoffs in effect, every single team in the garage knew Johnson's Lowe's No. 48 Chevrolet was the rabbit they were chasing. He didn't always score the most points over the full season, but he was always the driver with the greatest high-end ability on any given week.
He would generally collect a few early wins, slump a bit over the summer as his team pushed the envelope with riskier setups (simply because they could), and then grab another gear once September hit and leave the field in his dust for the final 10 weeks.
With Logano, it's different. His team has gamed the system by pouring everything into the winner-take-all championship round at Phoenix, and by hinging their hopes on being lucky enough to get there with a shot at a title.
Last season, Logano only made the playoffs to begin with because he won a five-overtime fuel mileage derby at Nashville Superspeedway in which he was running 15th with a handful of laps to go in the scheduled distance.
He then advanced into the round of 8 because Alex Bowman was disqualified at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval. And even with his playoff success, he only finished 11th in total points throughout the year.
No one looks at Logano's No. 22 Pennzoil Ford and sees the same fire-breathing dragon they saw during Johnson's reign of terror. When discussing the most visibly dominant drivers in the sport today, Logano's name hardly even registers.
Kyle Larson, Ryan Blaney, and Christopher Bell are currently the best in the business, with William Byron, Chase Elliott, Denny Hamlin, and Tyler Reddick close behind. Taking equipment deficiencies into consideration, there are cases for Ross Chastain and Kyle Busch above him, too.
Call it a product of NASCAR's playoff format or just dumb luck, but when a three-time champion performs like a 10th place driver and no one is even surprised, that's an issue. NASCAR desperately needs a new dynasty to string multiple titles together, one in which when the champion is not the class of the field, people notice.