BRISTOL, Tenn. — It was just 10 months ago that Team Penske’s Joey Logano was celebrating one of the crowning moments of his career.
He had just collected his second NASCAR Cup Series title after winning the Championship Four race at Phoenix (Ariz.) International Raceway by 235-feet over Ross Chastain of Trackhouse Racing.
He also had given team owner Roger Penske a first in his career — a NASCAR Cup Series title in the same year that Team Penske won a NTT IndyCar Series championship. That was claimed by Will Power in 2022.
It was a great time to be Joey Logano, and he was determined to come out swinging to successfully defend his second Cup title.
But on Saturday night at Bristol Motor Speedway, it all came apart.
Logano was involved in the only crash of the race. Corey LaJoie’s Chevrolet spun down the backstretch, hit the pit lane wall and rebounded back up the track in turn three on Lap 263. LaJoie’s car slid into the back of Logano’s No. 22 Shell Ford. It has significant damage to the rear of the car and Logano was out of the race.
He finished 34th out of 36 cars and becomes the first reigning Cup Series champion to be eliminated in the first round of the playoffs.
“Obviously, it’s a real bummer,” Logano said. “You get out of the race like that and you’re behind the wall and you’re in denial for a minute. You don’t want to believe that it happened, and you want to think that it’s fixable, but the car was tore up too bad.”
It all ended in a flash — or a puff of smoke.
“I saw the smoke,” Logano recalled. “I saw the 7 spinning. I heard on my radio, ‘He’s coming up. He’s coming up.’ As I was on the brakes to try to pull onto the bottom. I think it was Ryan Newman behind me, but I think someone hit him behind him and it was just kind of a chain reaction into it.
“Once I got hit, I was like, ‘Shoot, I’ve got to go up now’ because I couldn’t make the bottom, so I committed to that, and the hole closed up.”
But being eliminated in the first round wasn’t the result of a one-race incident for Logano.
In his mind, it was a season-long lack of speed that he wasn’t able to find in his Ford Mustang.
“Speed,” he said. “Just a lot of things. It’s what happens. You don’t go fast enough, you’re in the back and they wreck in front of you at Bristol on a restart and you’re going so fast that you can’t whoa up or turn or do anything and you get kind of pile drove into the wreck. It’s our own fault.
“I knew my situation and what I needed to do, but it’s Bristol and there’s not really many things you do differently depending on your scenario. There’s nothing I could have done there in that wreck. It’s just a product of being back there and the way we raced or anything like that didn’t affect that. The only thing that affected that is we were back there, so that’s it.”
During his championship season in 2022, Logano won four races, had 11 top fives and 17 top-10 finishes in 36 starts.
In 2023, he has one win, nine top fives and 14 top 10s in 29 races.
It’s been an uphill battle all year for the Team Penske driver.
“I haven’t really felt like we’ve made any big gains that we need to and unfortunately it seems like it’s at every track,” Logano said. “Typically, you may say, ‘Oh, we’re off on a mile-and-a-half, but our short tracks are OK, or your road courses are OK.’
“It just seems like we’re off everywhere right now, so we’ll see what happens here the rest of the race and if we get knocked out it gives us a few races to swing big and try to figure it out for next year. That’s about where we’re at, so we’ll wait anxiously. We just move forward from here.”
Instead of racing to win, Logano has had to learn how to race for 15th.
That’s uncharacteristic for a driver who has had the success Logano has experienced.
“It takes something different out of a driver to drive a car in 15th and tonight we weren’t even that,” he said. “It’s a little uncharacteristic for us right now and we just have to go to work and keep our heads down and stay faithful in each other, keep trusting each other that we can figure it out. It’s still the same team that won the championship last year.
“We’re a little lost at the moment, but we’ll keep fighting and try to figure some things out.”
The disappointment began to show for Logano as he was asked once again to assess the first 29 races of the season for his team, and how it got into this position.
“Like I said, I’m not saying it’s over yet, but at the moment obviously not as good as we needed to be — inconsistent, not fast enough, not scoring stage points,” he said firmly. “When you don’t score stage points that just says you’re not fast enough. We’ve been able to manufacture finishes like we did last year.
“Paul Wolfe (crew chief) does a great job of giving me a chance to finish good. If this was a few years ago and there wasn’t stage racing, we’d be sitting in a lot better shape because we would figure out a way to close races, but we don’t score the points during the race because we’re just not fast enough.”
Logano and Team Penske will have the next seven races to find the speed, but it will be too late for it to matter in this year’s playoff run.