Joey Logano is ready to relive 2018, looking for repeat run at NASCAR championship
There are a few things that have reminded Joey Logano of previous NASCAR seasons despite the abnormal circumstances of the year.
The first was the decision by Joe Gibbs Racing to release its No. 20 driver Erik Jones after the season. Logano experienced an “almost identical” departure with Gibbs seven years earlier. Logano, driver of the No. 22 Ford Mustang for Team Penske, reached out to his competitor after watching Jones’ interview on an NBC Sports broadcast before the race at Michigan.
“I was sitting in my bus and I think he was with (NBC’s) Marty Snider and the question was asked about next year and what it was,” Logano said. “And I said, ‘Oh my God. I remember this.’ Like, it just came rushing back and I was like, ‘Oh, this poor kid.’ ”
The two drivers grabbed lunch and Logano shared his experience. He said he tried to “speak life” into his own situation to show what the future could hold for Jones.
“It doesn’t mean that he’s gonna win the championship (five) years from now like we were able to do,” Logano said. “Who knows what’s going to happen? But I do know that it’s steering him down a direction that God is pointing him to be in.”
The conversation stuck with Jones, who called Logano’s gesture unexpected and “really cool.” It was just one of the instances that illustrates Logano’s leadership qualities, which helped him achieve his first Cup championship with Team Penske in 2018.
Last year, all three Penske drivers missed the final four championship race, and the organization’s lineup got a mix-up for 2020: Logano’s former crew chief Todd Gordon moved to Ryan Blaney’s team, and Brad Keselowski’s former crew chief Paul Wolfe moved to Logano’s team. Blaney’s former crew chief, Jeremy Bullins, is working with Keselowski.
While it’s still early to determine the success of the personnel switches, all three drivers are primed to enter the 2020 playoffs this weekend with at least one race win. Logano has two wins, both of which came before the pandemic forced new protocols and race formats, which include no practice or qualifying sessions. Logano said Wednesday that although he’s almost used to racing without practice by now, the lack of in-person interaction has hindered his ability to lead his team alongside a new crew chief.
“I’m typically the guy that’s in the garage until the garage closes,” Logano said. “The way I led was by being present and building relationships. It’s been a little harder to do that this year for sure, but we have to find unique ways of trying to gather the team together and rally the troops.”
That inevitably means more Zoom calls, a pandemic practice that has some drivers at their wits’ end.
“Zoom meetings suck,” No. 14 Stewart-Haas Racing driver Clint Bowyer said. “If there’s anything I hate of the pandemic, it’s Zoom meetings. And backdrops. And Zoom meetings.”
Logano, not as passionately opposed to video communication as Bowyer, said his team is finding creative ways to stay connected and that he’s trying to “lead a team from a distance.”
Health precautions are heightened for playoff drivers, especially, since a positive COVID-19 test could ruin their run at a championship title. If a playoff driver tests positive for the virus over the next 10 weeks and misses a race, the same rules from the regular season apply. The driver will not receive any points for races missed, which would severely hurt their chances for progressing in the playoffs.
Both Austin Dillon and Jimmie Johnson, who missed races earlier this year due to positive COVID-19 tests, said they think it’s a fair practice to continue rules from the regular season, which some have said prevented Johnson from making the playoffs after he was unable to add any points, including for car entry with a replacement driver, at Indianapolis.
“Our safety needs to be at the utmost concern,” Logano said.
In response to a question of whether playoff drivers would be hesitant to report symptoms or get tested for fear of missing a race, Logano added that, “In a selfless way, we need to be smart about testing.”
“Also we need to be smart about who we see and how we do things and all that as much as ever,” Logano said. “As the world’s starting to open up slowly and things like that, I think for these 10 weeks, I probably still need to be pretty smart about it because my season is on the line.”
Although Logano sees the fewer in-person team interactions as a hindrance, he noted that the rules are the same for everyone, making his chances for winning the Cup title this year as fair as anyone else’s.
“We have to do things differently to achieve that trophy than we would have if it was a normal year,” Logano said. “But the cards are dealt and we know what we got, and we just gotta play it the best we can.”
The driver expressed confidence about his chances heading into the postseason. He is ranked fourth in playoff points behind Kevin Harvick, Denny Hamlin and Brad Keselowski, in that order.
The reason for his confidence, though, comes from another look to the past. Logano said this season so far has reminded him of his championship run in 2018, in which his team won just one race during the regular season, then advanced through the round of 8 with a win at Martinsville to contend for the final four championship shootout. He won the race, and the title, despite Harvick’s and Kyle Busch’s eight wins each that year.
“You’re not going to find one thing that’s going to be a light switch that’s gonna put us all the way to where the 4 (Harvick) and the 11 (Hamlin) are, but we’re not far off,” Logano said. “We’re two or three little things away from that.”
Logano said that he feels like his team has built back its speed since the pandemic hit and that they’re “ready to win again” since their two wins early in the season at Las Vegas and Phoenix.
“I do feel like we’re getting close back to that same point as we were,” Logano said. “To me, there’s no doubt when we went back racing, we weren’t where we wanted to be.”
Although Logano said the “road back” has taken longer than expected, he said he feels like his team is “really close, back to where it was at the beginning of the year,” meaning the timing could be right to position themselves for another run in the final four.
“We’ve had some growing pains (in 2018) and some things we had to learn throughout the regular season, and we slowly built the speed back up for the playoffs,” Logano said. “And next thing you know, we won the two of the most important races and we won the championship, right?”
Although Logano said he can’t predict whether history will repeat itself with Jones, he’s hoping another past experience plays out for a second time.
“It just has that (same) feeling to me throughout the regular season,” Logano said. “So I feel like for those reasons, I’m as confident as anybody rolling into this thing, in our race team and myself, because we’ve been here before. We’ve done this before. So we’re ready to rock.”
This story was originally published September 3, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
