WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. — Joey Logano has been at ease over the last few days. Rather than fretting about Watkins Glen Int’l and Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway, he’s already able to start preparing for the Round of 12.
Logano won last weekend’s NASCAR Cup Series playoff opener at Atlanta Motor Speedway, leading nine laps and holding off Daniel Suárez to score his 34th career victory.
It eliminates any remaining pressure surrounding the Round of 16 – he’s guaranteed a spot in the second round. But at the same time, he still wants to hammer down.
“I slept better than I was going to, for sure,” Logano said in a press conference Friday. “It gave us the advantage to start looking towards Kansas already, which is nice to do. But we still were looking at some Watkins stuff. I mean, there’s still playoff points to grab in the next two weeks. So we’ll hit the next two as hard as we can and try to get stage wins and race wins.
“You still gotta race. You still got to try to go out there and win like we talked about. Getting five playoff points would be huge for us. So there’s no reason for us to lay up here.”
Logano’s win – his second of the 2024 season – increased his playoff point total to 12 after he scored just seven over the first 26 races of the campaign.
And in just one race, Logano already accomplished more than what he did a year ago.
Crashing at Bristol and finishing 34th, Logano failed to advance beyond the Round of 16 – becoming the first defending champion to exit in the opening round since the beginning of the elimination era.
For whatever reason, Logano’s had the most success in even years. Since 2014, he’s made the Championship 4 every other year, winning a pair of titles along the way. And neither of those years was he the runaway favorite.
In both 2018 and 2022, he won the opening race of the Round of 8 before winning the finale to secure the Cup Series crown. He won just once in the 2018 regular season and twice in 2022.
So could the 34-year-old be on a similar trajectory in 2024?
“We’ve been here before where we’ve not had the best regular season, and then the playoffs start, and you’re like, where did all that come from?” he said. “I’d say we’ve always felt pretty confident that we can go win the championship on any year no matter how you get into playoffs. You hear a lot of drivers say you just got to stay in it, survive and advance. That’s important to keep in mind because if you can survive long enough — and we talked about how close the field is these days — you have a couple good races and boom you’re in the next round.
“You have another good race where you win one and next thing you know you’re in a Championship Four and you’ve got a shot to win this whole thing.
“It doesn’t take much to be to go from mediocre through the regular season to being a threat to win the championship. It’s the smallest little detail. So to ever think you’re out of it is kind of crazy to think. Even with not having the most playoff points or having the most wins on the season, whatever it may be, you’re never really out of this thing. Until you’re out. Then you’re out.”
Valuing playoff points, that’s why Watkins Glen is so important to Logano even though he’s locked into the next round. In 14 starts at The Glen, he has a win and seven top 10s, including a third-place finish with the Next Gen car two years ago.
But there are new factors to account for this year. NASCAR changed the curbing in Turn One and the Bus Stop and Goodyear is bringing a new tire that is expected to fall off three seconds during a run.
Logano is doing the Xfinity Series race Saturday for AM Racing to understand the new track limits, but that won’t prepare him for the high tire degradation on Sunday.
“It will adjust the strategy kind of depending on what we see for fall-off tomorrow in practice,” Logano said. “It’s too hard to call the race right now and saying that this is gonna be the fastest way to run the race but you know we’ll see. That three seconds of fall-off is kind of back to old Sonoma numbers with three or four seconds of fall-off. That’s great. I think that’s fun. It’ll be exciting to see who’s got the falloff and who doesn’t and comers and goers and the strategy of it.
“It definitely adds another layer to the race.”