NASCAR Cup Series

Lessons learned last year have Joey Logano jacked up about his Chase chances

Published Nov. 15, 2016 3:19 p.m. ET

Joe Menzer

It is a different year and a different sort of Chase for the Sprint Cup for Joey Logano.

After winning Sunday’s Chase elimination race at Talladega Superspeedway, Logano is hoping that means he’ll ultimately have a much different -- as in better -- end result.

Logano won last year’s fall Chase race at Talladega, too. It was his third win in a row, in fact, as he swept all three races in the Round of 12 to firmly establish himself as a championship favorite.

There was one, not-so-tiny problem. He had knocked Matt Kenseth out of the way to win one of those races at Kansas -- and Kenseth wasn’t going to forget about it.

So one week after last year’s big win for Logano at Talladega, as Logano was leading yet another race in his No. 22 Team Penske Ford, Kenseth, who was four laps down at the time, took him out at Martinsville.

The payback earned Kenseth a two-race suspension from NASCAR. It also effectively ended any realistic hopes Logano had of advancing from the Round of 8 to the Championship 4 who raced for the title in the winner-take-all, season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

That’s ancient history now. Gone but never completely forgotten in Logano’s mind.

He believes his frame of mind, by the way, is in better shape at this point in this Chase than it was at this point in last year’s Chase. Considering that last year he had a series-high six wins at this point and was a Chase favorite, as opposed to this year when he has only two wins and will be driving the lone Ford in the Chase Round of 8, that’s saying something.

“You know, as a person you always grow or you hope to grow every day,” Logano said Sunday after his latest Talladega triumph. “You hope to rest your head at bed every night and say, ‘I learned this today, I'm going to be better tomorrow.’

“I feel like I'm better today than I was yesterday. I feel like I should be. That's the only way you become better and the only way you stay successful because (if you don’t) you'll get caught up and passed before you know it.”
Or run over from behind, as Logano was last year by Kenseth at Martinsville.

“Yeah, I learned some valuable lessons last year,” Logano said. “I learned a whole new level I didn't even know I had. Now I know how to reach that level mentally inside a race car to make things happen and be a great leader for my team.”

That was put to the test early in Sunday’s race, when Logano bolted from pit road with the jack still wedged underneath his No. 22 Ford. He tried to swerve to get it to come loose, but ended up calmly navigating one full circuit around the 2.66-mile track with the jack still intact.

Logano said he didn’t even realize the jack was there “for the longest time.”

“My crew chief Todd (Gordon) said, ‘Hey, you've got the jack with you,” he added. “I'm looking around. Look in the mirror. I didn't really see it. Then I looked to the left, I saw the jack post like at my head. I thought, ‘Oh, I don't need that.’ I tried to shake it off. Couldn't do that. Had to come back down pit road.

“Maybe it was a blessing we didn't lose it. You run that thing over, it could have done a lot of damage to our race car. … Ultimately it was okay. We have to buy a new jack for next week, but it's nice to know that we had a world record of fastest lap with a jack underneath a race car.”

He had to serve a stop-and-go penalty anyway, so he came down pit road, had the jack removed, and luckily caught a caution that kept him on the lead lap. He went on to work his way back up to the front and to ultimately win the race.

The key is that he didn’t panic. That same approach, coupled with the common-sense lessons learned a year ago, should serve him well the rest of this Chase.