In a NASCAR season where anything could happen, ‘favorite’ Joey Logano prevails anyway
After the wild regular-season race at Daytona a few months ago, Joey Logano declared that his No. 22 team was the favorite in the field.
Not for a particular race. Not for a run to the Championship 4.
For it all.
“I feel like, for sure, when these playoffs started this season, he was on his A-game,” Logano’s crew chief, Paul Wolfe, told reporters after making his trip down Victory Lane. “He was focused and determined that we were going to win this championship. And that’s the way he would talk as he would come into the shop, and when he was around the guys, the time we would spend together.
“There was no doubt in his mind that we were the favorite and that we were going to get it done.”
It’s not sensational to say that Sunday marked the end of a Cup Series season that was thrilling because anything could’ve happened at any time. There were 19 different winners and five first-time winners in 2022. No driver, for the first time since 1960, led 1,000 laps on the year.
Young drivers emerged. Veteran drivers had moments of renaissance. Teams that had never won a Cup race did so — and one team that began racing in 2021, TrackHouse Racing, was among the most potent and disruptive teams the sport had ever seen.
And yet despite all the parity and unpredictability and the gripes with the Next Gen car and everything else that will underscore the 2022 season’s legacy, the last guy standing was Logano — the friendly, smiley father of three off the track and the take-no-prisoners, 32-year-old driver on the track who’d been to the sport’s summit before.
Amid all this change, in other words, the best driver this year prevailed anyway.
“I think as a company, there were a lot of challenges starting this season with this new car and what all that meant, and it was definitely an up-and-down year, and there were a lot of growing pains,” Wolfe said. “But I feel like we continued to learn and get better every week. And I don’t know if that’s what gave him the confidence to believe in the team.”
It would make sense if it did.
The paths each championship driver took to get to Phoenix showed just how unpredictable 2022 was.
Chase Elliott made a third-straight run to the Championship 4 but did so differently than he had before, using a dominant regular-season run to carry him through the playoffs.
Christopher Bell had a walk-off win at the Charlotte Roval and a walk-off win at Martinsville to advance to his first final four at the Cup level.
Ross Chastain, less than a decade ago, was an eighth generation watermelon farmer playing NASCAR video games on his GameCube with his brother. Now he’s the fan-beloved driver who can’t watch a trucks race without being mobbed near pit road after making that up-the-wall move at Martinsville that was immediately canonized in NASCAR culture.
Logano’s path to the title race wasn’t rid of doubt, either. He won four times — twice in the playoffs, including in Sunday’s championship race at Phoenix Raceway — but it also was a year of learning.
“To win the first race at the Coliseum, and then to cap it off here is pretty amazing when you think about it,” said Roger Penske, the Team Penske owner who notched his third owner’s championship on Sunday. “During the season, we weren’t quite as competitive as we wanted to be as we got to know the car. And again, this teamwork we talked about made a big difference.
“We won the first race with the car, and won the championship, so it was a good omen for us.”
Drivers couldn’t help but admit that Logano’s win was worthy.
“He’s a very deserving champion,” Elliott told NBC Sports postrace on pit road. “And frankly I’m happy for them.”
Logano walked into the Phoenix Raceway press room at 6 p.m. local time — after celebrating with his son, Hudson, and his wife, Brittany — and he offered perspectives that dripped with gratitude and nostalgia.
But against all odds and conventional wisdom in this strange season, Logano made it clear, too: He knew Sunday’s championship moment would come months before it did.
And he was right.
“We made sure that there was no stone unturned when it came to preparing for this race,” Logano said. “And when you saw how confident I was, and how confident my team was, it’s because we were truly ready. You can’t fake confidence. I mean, you can maybe show it a little bit, but truly deep-down inside, you have to believe that if you’re going to be ready for this battle ahead of you.
“And I’d never felt more ready.”
