NASCAR’s Joey Logano puts championship in rear-view mirror as series rolls into Kansas
Joey Logano doesn’t wake up each morning thinking about his status as reigning Monster Energy NASCAR Cup champion.
Far from it.
“Right now, I wake up and say I’m second in points,” Logano said with a laugh. “I need to get back into the lead. As a team, it was nice to accomplish that, a championship. We had a lot of fun and so many memories that will last a lifetime for all of us — for our whole team it was our first championship — so you could imagine what that’s like for everybody on the race team. “
After winning the championship, the Team Penske No. 22 Ford team sent the Cup trophy to each member for a week as it went on tour like the Stanley Cup.
“But it was last year, man,” Logano said. “We’ve got to keep looking out the windshield. If we look at the rear-view mirror too much, we’ll be going backward.”
Logano, who turns 29 on May 24, wasted little time beginning the defense of the championship. He won the second race of the season, at Las Vegas, virtually assuring a spot in the 16-driver playoffs, and he trails leader Kyle Busch by a scant 5 points heading into the Digital Ally 400 Saturday night at Kansas Speedway.
“When you get that win, it takes a little bit of a weight off your shoulders,” Logano said. “That’s one of the boxes checked to get into the playoffs, now it’s all about collecting more wins, more playoff points, winning more stages, being aggressive to do that. It’s the first box checked, it’s not the last box, and we have a long way to go before the playoffs start.”
Penske and Joe Gibbs Racing have dominated the early part of the season by winning 10 of the first 11 races, including seven by Gibbs and three by Penske drivers Brad Keselowski (two) and Logano.
Clearly, the Penske Mustangs and Gibbs Toyota Camrys have figured out the new, much-discussed and cussed 2019 rules packages better than their competitors.
“I don’t know if there’s a real answer,” Logano said. “A lot of times if you’re ahead or behind, it’s because of small things, not one big item. I think we made some good decisions during the offseason building cars, and that’s being rewarded. Our sport goes in cycles. You try to stay on top for as long as possible. But you know your competitors are always trying to find something.
“Our cars are parked right next to each other every week in the garage. So there is a lot of monkey-see, monkey-do going on. You try to hold your cards close to your vest and keep looking to improving because the advantage you have may only be for a week or two before teams catch up.”
The new rules, which include a reduction in horsepower from 750 to 550 on intermediate-sized tracks like 1.5-mile Kansas Speedway, are designed to slow the cars and create more chances for passing and drafting. Consequently, some teams have had to throw away the old notes and devise new strategies at places like Kansas.
“It’s fresh to everybody in ‘How do we become successful again?”’ Logano said. “The race you’re going to see this week is going to be one of the closest and most intense we’ve seen at Kansas. With the 550 rules and progressive banking at Kansas, the cars are going to be bumper-to-bumper for a long, long time throughout the run.
“There’s going to be some really intense, aggressive passes going on, crazy things going on. We’re going to have to be on our game to make the big moves to be able to put yourself in front.”
Logano has enjoyed success at Kansas, where he won consecutive fall races in 2014 and 2015. He was third last spring, and his eighth-place finish in the fall race, allowed him to advance to the Round of Eight in the playoffs.
“It’s a track that I enjoy. Since the repave (in 2012), a lot of times, as drivers we’re not really excited about it because we like the wore-out surfaces, but the way they paved that, to where the bottom lane and the top lane are very equal, that’s what puts good racing out for fans.”