There’s no question, the Hendrick Motorsports camp is the top organization in NASCAR’s premiere series right now from top to bottom. They could have arguably won six of the eight races run this year. That’s how fast that their cars are. Instead, they do have two wins and Alex Bowman and Chase Elliott look like legitimate championship contenders.

No. 2 though, well I think it belongs to Team Penske.

“I think the best group out there right now is Hendrick,” said Ryan Blaney who earned two third place finishes at Charlotte this past week. “They have really great speed right now on the mile-and-a-halfs or the bigger tracks.  I’ve seen it.  They might not — they’ve kind of had some unfortunate circumstances, which is actually our team has capitalized on.  The Penske group has capitalized on at a couple of them tracks, but Hendrick is really strong.  I feel like we’re close with our group.  We’ve just got to find a little bit more.

Charlotte was never a good track for them in the past. They had one win in the history of their organization in the Coca-Cola 600, then Brad Keselowski gives them No. 2 on Sunday night. But, it wasn’t just one race, it was both races at Charlotte that gives me reason to believe Penske is right there with HMS.

Penske has won three of the eight races run in 2020 and if you count HMS’s victory total with theirs and you get them winning five of eight.

At Charlotte, Keselowski finished first and seventh respectively in his No. 2 Ford. He cut a left rear tire in the first stage but battled back from 25th and 27th respectively in both stages to earn his third top seven in his last four Charlotte starts.

“It wasn’t our prettiest day, but, all in all, we were decent,” Keselowski said. “We had a lot of speed in our car, not as much as maybe the 9 car. He was lights-out fast today, but we had enough to, I think, run in the top three or four. We had a little bit of contact early on and got a flat tire that did a lot of damage to the car, and we recovered and I got contact again and had a lot of damage to the car, but came back in to fix it. There at the end we started to recover. I think we drove up to seventh to finish the race, but it’s kind of not my strongest day. I was pushing a little bit too hard starting in the back and got us behind with damage a little bit early and had to kind of fight through it in a short race. We did the best we could to recover, but didn’t have enough laps and I put us in too big of a hole.

Joey Logano led 26 laps on Sunday and 42 more on Thursday. He brought his No. 22 Ford home sixth for just his second top 10 in his last seven tries at Charlotte. He too was a tad frustrated with his night.

“We had a solid to okay day,” Logano, a two-time winner this season said. “Solid to start and okay to finish. We started off with some good track position on the initial start and then had the opportunity to stay out, which we were able to grab a stage win and get another playoff point for the second week in a row, which is nice. We had a decent second stage and finished third, and then had two mediocre restarts that kind of put me back in the sixth or seventh place range. It was just impossible to pass. It’s so hard to pass. I rode behind the 1, which I was better than, but could not get to him. I was waiting for him to make a mistake, but he’s too good to make a mistake, so I rode around and waited and waited and waited. I needed a caution to have the opportunity to have a restart and a pit stop, but in this racing you just run hard, you try to get everything you can on restarts. Details mean so much. We’re detail racing for sure and after that you hope that maybe there’s a car like the 4 that is fast and falls off, and there might be one or two cars that you might get on the long haul, possibly, but it’s tough at a track that’s just not wide enough.”

Then you have Blaney. In his previous eight Charlotte starts, his best finish was eighth. Five of those eight finishes prior to this year on the Charlotte oval were 20th or worse. He’d bring his No. 12 Ford home third twice now.

Penske went 3-6-7 on Thursday and showed that they have speed still.