North Wilkesboro Speedway held a NASCAR Cup Series points race on Sunday night for the first time in three decades. Joey Logano led most of it.
Logano led 323 of the 450 laps around the short North Carolina track and finished ahead of Denny Hamlin, with Chase Briscoe third, Ty Gibbs fourth and Shane van Gisbergen fifth. Motorsport.com put the winning margin at 0.859 seconds.
It was his first win of the 2026 season, and his first since Texas in May 2025.
A track that came back
The venue was most of the story before the race started. North Wilkesboro was a fixture of NASCAR's early decades and then closed to Cup competition in the 1990s, sitting largely dormant for years before a restoration effort brought it back, initially for exhibition events.
Sunday was the first race there to award championship points in 30 years. The last driver to win one was Jeff Gordon.
Short tracks like this reward a car that can hold the bottom line through traffic and a driver willing to run close to other cars for a long time. Leading 72 percent of the laps at one is not a matter of a fortunate strategy call.
What the win is worth
Logano came into the weekend outside the top 16 in the standings, which is the cut-off for NASCAR's playoff field.
That position had made his season awkward. He is a former series champion, and yet on the wrong side of the line that determines who can compete for the title. A win of this kind, with the points that come from leading throughout, is the most efficient way to repair a season.
It also continues an unusual streak: Logano has now won at least one race in 15 consecutive seasons, the longest active run of its kind in the series.
Streaks of that shape are a reasonable measure of a driver's durability. Fifteen years covers several rule packages, a change of car design and a substantial turnover in the field, and to have won in each of them says more than any single result does.
