A week ago, Joey Logano believed he was eliminated from the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs, and now he is less than a month away from a guaranteed 25 percent chance to win the championship.
Such is the modern NASCAR
What a topsy-turvy series of emotions the Penske 22 team must feel over the past seven days. When the checkered flag dropped last week at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval, they were the first team out.
Then came the news that Alex Bowman and the Hendrick Motorsports No. 48 failed minimum weight, and just like that, they were back and opened the Round of 8 with a victory that sent them to the championship race just like in 2018 and 2022, when they won the championship. They also qualified for the final four in 2014, 2016 and 2020.
We call it even year bullshit but it’s very much a real thing that Logano himself acknowledged in Victory Lane.
“We’re going to the Championship 4 again,” Logano said. “Even year. It’s real.”
His six appearances in the final one race round are the most of any driver since this format debuted in 2014.
“Our goal when we show up in Daytona every year for Media Day, What’s the goal? Win the championship,” Logano said. “There’s nothing else that matters. I don’t care how you get there, what you do, it’s all about winning the championship. A big step of that is getting into the Championship 4.
“There’s a lot of pride in making it to the Championship 4. It’s tough, right? A long year, you got to get through a lot of different scenarios, a lot of curve balls that are thrown your way. It’s hard, right? Making it is something to be proud of, there’s no doubt.
“I also have lived through the moments of getting to the Championship 4 and not winning and feeling that pain. Being that close and not winning, that sucks, right? I can’t put a better way of saying that. That hurts a lot.
“It’s all about maximizing the opportunity that’s ahead of us. As proud as I am that we’ve made it, I also feel like the job’s far from being over because I know what that feeling is if you don’t make it happen.”
Playoff disasters
It was a series of disasters for every team now currently below the cutline.
Logano went from the lowest seed still available to locked in, while Christopher Bell scored a tremendous number of stage points with William Byron not that much further behind. And even a bad day for Kyle Larson was still mitigated by his regular season points advantage.
There has never, in the decade-long history of this format, been as large of a gap for those on the outside to overcome after the first race in the semifinals.
The case could be made that Denny Hamlin, Tyler Reddick, Ryan Blaney and Chase Elliott all have to win one of the next two races at Homestead-Miami Speedway and Martinsville Speedway.
The first instance of playoff chaos occurred on Lap 89 when Martin Truex slipped traction under Chase Elliott and Tyler Reddick, sending both championship contenders into the wall, along with Brad Keselowski. Reddick caught air and flipped over the infield Quarter Midget track and defending champion Ryan Blaney slammed into the wall trying to avoid the melee.
It eliminated all three from contention.
“I kind of saw them both have a moment, and I just had to split second make a decision,” Reddick said. “You have to be aggressive on the restart. It is hard to pass after a while. Being myself on a mile and a half, being aggressive – by the time I realized I was in trouble, (Truex) started sliding and (Elliott) was coming up and I was pretty much already on their outside at that point, with nowhere to really go.
“I needed to make the decision earlier when I saw them sliding to be more conservative to avoid an incident – just not who I am, but it is unfortunate. It took us out of the race. We had a really, really fast Jordan Brand Toyota Camry, probably would have been in the mix all race long, but we will go to Homestead – a place where I have had to get it done before and go for it there.”
Elliott said Truex just thought the two of them would have room before Reddick made his charge up against the wall.
“The 45 was coming with a really big run on the top,” Elliott said. “I don’t think Martin (Truex Jr.) knew that, and he was kind of running as if we were two-wide. Once I recognized that there wasn’t going to be enough room, I bailed and there was just nowhere to bail.. it was too late. I need to sit down and take a look at it. I was, personally, just trying to get out of the situation and it was just a little too late at that point. It sucks.”
Truex said the same.
“We were in the bottom, thought we were two-wide, spotter said leave a lane so not sure we were that close together and the 9 lifted so I don’t know what happened,” Truex told Frontstretch. “I feel like I didn’t know we were three wide til late and I don’t know the 9 got out of the gas so I’m not sure what happened.”
The whole ordeal, again, buried all of them in the standings with just one race to get back within single digit points or needing to win one of these next two.
“It’s really simple,” he said. “We have to win. We’re way too far away to try to point our way in honestly. So yeah, just have to go try to win our way in from Homestead and Martinsville. Honestly, we thought going into this round that we needed to win anyway so it’s not a mindset change, even though it’s obviously disappointing.”
Reddick initially thought he was going to be around 17 points out but it’s way worse.
“We can still have a good day at Homestead and be in the mix in Martinsville,” Reddick said. “Ideally, yeah, it would have been nice to win today. It would be nice to win next week, and that is what we will focus on, but thankfully we got 10 stage points in stage one, and it’s not like we are absolutely out of it on points, yet. We are going to have to be perfect here on out, probably.”
Meanwhile, Hamlin had his own series of problems, two slow pit stops, one vibration due to a missing wheel weight and just a car that struggled to find speed on two tire stops intended to make up some of that lost track position.
“Not a clean day,” Hamlin said. “That certainly sums it up. You’ll have that. We did the best we could to get the best finish. I thought Chris (Gabehart, crew chief) did a great job to get some sort of finish. Once we lost the track position early, he was doing the best he could to try to get it back through strategy, and then it goes long there, and we fall to the back. Just part of it.”
Hamlin finished eighth, by merit of the same fuel mileage gambit that won Logano the race, and that mitigated the damage but 27 is practically must-win territory too.
“I don’t know where we are at, but certainly, we are not running quite as strong as we were earlier in the year, and we are definitely not as clean, execution wise, as we were. We will just have to clean it up and go to Homestead and try to win it,” Hamlin said.
In the clear?
On one hand, Christopher Bell is going to feel the sting of once again coming up short at Las Vegas and being denied an automatic berth into the Championship 4 but on the other, +42 is as good as anyone could ask with two races left.
But Bell led the most laps, had the dominant car, and in real-time, not winning the race was hard to digest.
Bell and crew chief Adam Stevens opted to pit so the 20 team could be on the attack, and hopefully force those who stayed out to either run out of gas or back their pace down so much that they would cough up their track position.
The case could be made that they were one lap away from getting there.
“Joey had his teammate (Blaney) blocking for him so it was going to take the right move but we had 30 or 40 laps newer tires than him and I just didn’t get there,” Bell said.
That wasn’t a slight at the Penske teammates either.
“It’s fair game,” Bell said. “Props to him. I think the 22 winning was probably bad for the 12 because they were racing each other on points to get in, but Penske won the race and got one car in so they did it right.”
But again, two clean races at Homestead, where he is the defending winner, and Martinsville, where he won in 2022, and Bell will go to the final four for the third year in a row.
“The points position is a positive but nothing is guaranteed in this sport,” Bell said. “We watched Justin Allgaier have a 40-point regular season lead going into Bristol (in the Xfinity Series) and lost it, so nothing is guaranteed. We have to win. A win is a guarantee and it was right in our grasps.”
Byron finished fourth, and is in just as good of a spot, but feels just as skittish as Bell does.
“Just sucks. It’s going to take a win, I feel like, so we have to keep working for it and keep running up front,” Byron said. “If we run up front, it will do two things – we’ll be able to compete for a win and score a lot of points. We just have to keep running like this.”
Larson had a ‘messy messy day’ of his own on pit road but also entered this round as the top seeded driver and one stage point plus an 11th place finish was a buffer to keep him in good standing.
“None of the first races in the rounds have been clean, at all, for us,” Larson said. “But this was a long, hard-fought 11th-place finish. We just had a lot of unfortunate things happen with the debris that got stuck on our nose. We were able to overcome that and I thought we were going to be fine. We had a strong finish in the second stage, and then we had the issues on the pit stop and just had to fight from there.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.