Team Penske superstar Joey Logano is one step away from claiming his third Cup Series title. He won in Las Vegas last Sunday and secured the chance to race for the championship in Phoenix.
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The interesting part about his qualification is that not many expected it. He did not have a great season and made it into the Round of 8 by the sheer luck of Alex Bowman’s disqualification during the Charlotte Roval weekend.
Extreme is the right way to describe his campaign. He has a bunch of finishes outside the top 30 and a bunch of unexpected wins that have brought him this far. So, how does he deal with all these ups and downs that have been nothing short of a wild roller coaster ride? He answered in a recent interview with NBC Sports. It is simple. He remembers that racing is not everything.
The former champion’s words went, “There’s stuff that matters more than sports, right? Keeping things into perspective whether it’s your family, your kids. Whether it’s what’s going on in the mountains of North Carolina.”
“All those things are way bigger deals, right? And people are going through way tougher times than when you’re knocked out of the playoffs. Oh, boohoo, right?”
Remembering the bigger purposes out there is what keeps things in check for him, personally. His wife and his children play a huge role in helping him do that.
He added that drivers need to be happy about the fact that they still drive race cars for a living and that it’s a pretty cool thing. However, he acknowledged that different people deal with this wave of emotion in different ways.
How Logano turned the 2024 Cup Series table upside down
For the first 16 races of the season, Logano’s average finish was 17.9. This was his worst run after 2011 and it spelled a crumbling downfall. But he punched way into the playoffs by winning in Nashville on June 30. One would’ve expected this to be a turning point for him but it wasn’t.
His results did not get better and he finished 19th or worse five times in the last seven races of the regular season. The common expectation was that he would get eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. But he ended up winning the very first race of the postseason, in Atlanta and gained promotion to the Round of 12.
This should have been as far as he went. He secured an eighth-place finish in the final race of the round, in the Charlotte Roval. But this didn’t appear to be enough until NASCAR ruled that Bowman would be disqualified for having an underweight car during the post-race inspection.
This sudden turn of luck gave Logano a seat in the Round of 8. Las Vegas is a destination where he can never be ruled out. He had won there three times already, and he did so again on Sunday to storm into the Championship 4. And now, the rest of the field has no choice but to be scared of his chances in Phoenix.
