For the second year in a row, Team Penske’s Joey Logano has opened the Contender Round of the post-season Chase with a victory and guaranteed himself a spot in the next round of the ten-race title hunt. Logano crushed the field Sunday at Charlotte Motor Speedway, leading 227 of the 334 laps in notching his fourth victory of the season. He beat runner-up Kevin Harvick to the checkered flag by three-quarters of a second, keeping his Number-22 Ford in front over the final thirty-five laps. Martin Truex Junior finished third with Denny Hamlin and Kurt Busch completing the top five.

Pole sitter Matt Kenseth led seventy-two laps but was sidelined by an accident midway through the second half of the race. He finished next-
to-last in the forty-three-car field, tumbling to the bottom of the Chase standings with the post-season hitting the halfway mark next weekend at Kansas Speedway.

Chase drivers took eight of the nine top finishing positions with Austin Dillon the only non-title contender among them, in seventh place. The four other drivers in the Contender Round all finished outside the top ten and slipped to the bottom of the post-season standings. Ryan Newman was fifteenth, Kyle Busch twentieth, Dale Earnhardt Junior twenty-eighth and Kenseth forty-second.

The race was originally scheduled to be run Saturday night, but rain moved it to Sunday afternoon. For Logano, it’s his twelfth career victory … Carl Edwards finished sixth in his bid for a season sweep at C-M-S. He won the Coca-Cola 600 back on May 24th.

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Team Penske’s Joey Logano kept a hard-charging Kevin Harvick in his rear-view mirror throughout the closing laps Saturday night at Bristol Motor Speedway, winning under the lights in “Thunder Valley” for the second year in a row. Logano kept the Number-22 Ford in front over the final sixty-three trips around the Tennessee half-mile in posting his third win of the season and the eleventh of his career.

The margin of victory was twenty-two one-hundredths of a second over Harvick with pole sitter Denny Hamlin, Jimmie Johnson and Clint Bowyer completing the top five … Harvick continues to cruise through 2015 with a comfortable lead in the regular-season standings. Heading into a late-summer break in the schedule, Harvick enjoys a forty-three-point advantage over Logano. The defending Sprint Cup Series champion has twenty-one top tens in twenty-four starts this season including ten runner-up finishes, and victories at Las Vegas and Phoenix International Raceway.

Harvick has been atop the point standings since his win in Vegas way back on March 8th … Kyle Busch, a four-time winner this year, further solidified his eligibility for a post-season Chase berth with an eighth-place finish at Bristol. He now holds a forty-six-point cushion over Cole Whitt in his bid to remain among the top thirty with just two races left in the regular season. Busch led a race-high 192 laps Saturday night in his bid for a weekend sweep after winning Friday’s X-FINITY Series race.

The Sprint Cup Series will have next weekend off before returning to action Sunday, September 6th, with the Bojangles’ Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway.