Paul Wolfe: Joey Logano 'capable' of making run at NASCAR title, but no guarantees

Joey Logano and crew chief Paul Wolfe won the 2022 and 2024 NASCAR Cup Series championships by being opportunistic. 

That will be much harder to do for the No. 22 team this season with the Chase format in place instead of the playoffs, where consistency matters much more and wins guarantee nothing but a large points payout. 

Still, Logano is back on the right side of the Chase bubble after his dominant win at North Wilkesboro and provided that he hangs on and makes the Chase, it'd be foolish to count he, Wolfe and the No. 22 group out entirely. 

Paul Wolfe: Still work to do with No. 22 team

"I think we're capable," Wolfe said Wednesday on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. "I like what we did last weekend, but being realistic, that doesn't mean we fixed everything. That's one style of racetrack that we know we've had a lot of success at. But we still have work to do on some of the other style racetracks.

"I don't know that it's fair for me to say, based off of last weekend's result that we're going to go out there and have a shot at it. I promise you this, we're not going to stop working and trying to. I'm not going to make any guarantees at the moment."

While North Wilkesboro was a huge shot in the arm for Logano, he only has seven top 10s in 21 races this summer. Making the Chase isn't even a guarantee for the 38-time Cup winner, who is only 49 points above the cut line with five races left in the regular season and has his worst average finish (18.9) since 2011, when he was at Joe Gibbs Racing. 

Still, the garage has learned before that you can truly never count Logano and the No. 22 team out of the championship battle, and they'd be silly to make the mistake of doing so in late July.