NASCAR: A perfect 10-year run could come to an end at Charlotte

Team Penske's Joey Logano entered Talladega Superspeedway on Sunday afternoon with just one top 10 finish in his 10 most recent NASCAR Cup Series starts at the track, despite having led laps in nine of those 10 races.

Now it's one top 10 finish in his 11 most recent starts at the four-turn, 2.66-mile (4.281-kilometer) high-banked Lincoln, Alabama oval for the driver of the No. 22 Ford, despite the fact that he led 19 more laps in Sunday's YellaWood 500.

Logano was taken out in a late "Big One" and scored in 33rd place, his fourth finish outside of the top 30 in the 10 most recent races. Now the two-time champion sits in ninth in the standings, 13 points below the round of 8 cut line with only this coming Sunday afternoon's race at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval remaining on the round of 12 schedule.

If Logano fails to advance, it will end an odd – no pun intended – Championship 4 streak.

The modern Cup Series playoff format was introduced in 2014. In every single even-numbered season, Logano has made it to the Championship 4, winning the titles in both 2018 and 2022. During that stretch, he has never made it in an odd-numbered year.

A failure to advance to the round of 8 would buck that trend three weeks early this year.

Logano has run well at the Charlotte Roval since it was added to the schedule in 2018, so elimination this weekend is far from a sure thing. In six starts, he has recorded an average finish of 8.67 with two top five finishes, including a runner-up effort in 2020, and three other finishes inside the top 10. He has also scored stage points in five of those six races, averaging 4.08 per stage.

But the 2024 season has been one of Logano's worst. His average finish of 18.3, top five tally of five, and top 10 tally of nine are all his lowest since 2011, and his laps led total of 301 is his worst since 2012.

Additionally, had it not been for a five-overtime race at Nashville Superspeedway and a finish during which he saved an incredible amount of fuel, Logano would have failed to qualify for the playoffs for the first time since 2017.

He finished the regular season in the top 16 in points, but because there were so many different winners, three winless drivers ahead of him were below where the cut line ended up and did not get in.

He did add a second win to his 2024 tally back in the round of 16 opener at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Last year, he became the first reigning champion to fail to make it to at least the round of 12, so though his statistics have been down overall, his 2024 postseason run has been a marked improvement over last year's.

If Logano does end up advancing to the round of 8, it would be challenging to pick against him to advance to the Championship 4, even for as "down" as his 2024 season has been. Nobody viewed him as a contender in 2018, but he got hot late and won the championship, and his average finish when he won the title in 2022 was his worst since 2017.

In other words, when it comes to the late rounds of the playoffs, nothing else matters, and Logano has proven he knows how to maneuver his way through the postseason in the modern era – in even years, that is.

The Bank of Americal Roval 400 is set to be shown live on NBC from the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval starting at 2:00 p.m. ET this Sunday, October 13. Begin a free trial of FuboTV now and don't miss any of the action from the final road course race of the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season!