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Joey Logano wins and puts both Team Penske cars into the next Chase round

Joey Logano wins and puts both Team Penske cars into the next Chase round

New Hampshire has been very kind to Joey Logano.

Statistically, Logano hasn't been great at the one-mile track (his average finish entering the race was 19.3), but it's the site of Logano's first Sprint Cup Series win and now his latest one as he pulled away from Kevin Harvick on multiple late race restarts to win on Sunday.

He's now guaranteed to advance to the next round of the Chase for the Sprint Cup along with last week's winner and Team Penske teammate Brad Keselowski after next week's race at Dover.

The race featured 15 cautions, the second-most in New Hampshire history, and after Logano took the lead from Harvick under green with more than 20 laps to go, he held on to it over the course of three restarts.

Logano got to the front with a strategy call that looked iffy at the time. Track position is always a dominant theme at New Hampshire and the first half of the race had largely been a green-flag affair. On lap 247, some 30 laps after the leaders last pitted, Logano's crew chief Todd Gordon called him down to pit road for four tires.

The call put Logano back in the pack, but it didn't matter. With fresher tires than the cars ahead of him, he sliced through the field.

"I thought we gave it away at that point," Logano said of pitting. "Man, four tires were good and we had some good restarts and were able to get ourselves back up there and had to work hard. This is my home race track. This is the coolest place to win for me. I could never pick a better place to win. I watched my first Cup race here when I was five and I won that other Cup race here and I just felt that I had to win one here the right way."

The "other" Cup race Logano refers to was on June 28, 2009. Logano, driving for Joe Gibbs Racing in his first full season in the Cup Series replacing Tony Stewart, played the fuel strategy game with then-crew chief Greg Zipadelli. It was his only choice after a cut tire and a car that was nowhere near the fastest on track. But it worked. When rain arrived to call the race early with 27 laps remaining, Logano was the leader.

There was no such trickeration on Sunday. He had one of the fastest cars throughout the course of the race and while Harvick, who ultimately finished third, felt Logano might have been accelerating too quickly on those restarts, he didn't have a car quick enough to chase Logano down once the lead had been established.

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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!