Even once the rumors started circulating that Alex Bowman was potentially at risk of failing post-race minimum weight inspection on Sunday at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval, Joey Logano didn’t allow himself to feel much
For one, he wasn’t sure that meant he was going to advance in the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs after he was eliminated by the unofficial results.
“Usually, nothing happens,” Logano said during a Tuesday teleconference. “It was kind of a surprise to hear that. Typically, by the time you roll the car off the scales, they give them the opportunity to put weight in the cars and you’re usually fine but in this case that wasn’t the case and I was like, ‘Well, would we be in?’
“That’s the first question you have to ask and obviously the answer was ‘yes’ and then you’re still kind of cautiously optimistic because you’re thinking, ‘Well, there probably will be an appeal if there is and we may not know until later,’ so you kind of keep going on with your life and preparing for the next race.
“Obviously, it came out yesterday that they’re not appealing, so we move on and into the Round of 8 and off we go.”
As far as Logano sees it, he was going to race for a championship no matter what, because even if the results stood, the Team Penske No. 22 was still in the owners playoff.
So what is the approach?
“The same way we would have if we’d made it any other way,” Logano said. “You go out there and you attack. The positives, I feel like we’ve been steadily getting better and improving throughout the season to where we are now. I feel confident in the speed we have in our car. Kansas, we had a lot of speed and almost won the first stage there. We have to clean up a couple issues on the execution side. Talladega is Talladga. We got caught up in the big crash there, but the speed we also had this weekend at the Roval looked pretty solid to me, to where we are a Championship 4 caliber race team.
“The stats may not look like it. It may look like we’re underdogs from the outset looking in, but internally we feel very confident in our race team that we can make a run at this thing and get ourselves into the Championship 4. We’ve seen it in the past where you get in there and anything can happen at Phoenix. The goal right now is to look at the next three races and how do we maximize that. We can point our way in. We’re only 11 out, so it’s not a lot of points by no means. It can happen very quickly, so one race at a time. Right now, the focus is Vegas and we’ll try to maximize the day there.”
To wit, this has been a less than stellar season holistically for Logano, who has just one win on the year. His 18.0 average finish is by far the worst of his career. But at the same time, Logano continues to do just enough to keep advancing and the past two years have seen Penske drivers catch fire in the final rounds en route to the championship.
“It’s NASCAR, man. I don’t know what to tell you,” Logano said. “Expect the unexpected. You’ve got to go and just roll with the punches and go with the flow and just continue on. I feel like these days more and more there are just seasons like this. There’s just more crazy things that can happen than ever before and a lot of that is due to the NextGen car, but it just seems like the simple …
“Look, last night, I was putting my son to bed and he likes reading those yearbooks on how the season went. We were reading one from ‘20 or ‘21, I’m not sure, and he started reading the finishing order and the top 10 was almost the same every weekend. It was the same top 10 drivers and now you look at the top 10 and it’s different every week. There are people in and out of that thing.
“It’s not like you’re clicking off twenty-something top 10s. There’s 10 cars doing that throughout the year. It doesn’t happen anymore. The game has changed. This car has completely changed everything that we used to know about NASCAR and now, like I said, I just go with it because it’s just the craziest things we do now. You look at the way we race on the track, the tracks that we go to, you name it and it can happen.”
Anything, like winning a championship in your worst season?
“Like I said, we’re right back in it and the goal was the same, whether we were in the driver’s championship still or not,” Logano said. “The owner’s side of it still mattered to us, so the mindset doesn’t change. The energy doesn’t change. We’re still going out there to maximize the day and win it if we can. That’s the goal, so I can’t say it changed much. Did it bring some excitement that this piece of it is still there? Yeah, absolutely. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel that way, but it doesn’t change much from the way it affects us as a race team.”