Joey Logano’s campaign to be named the 2024 Cup Series champion hasn’t kicked off all too well. After 12 of the 36 races on the calendar, he has managed to bring in a singular top-5 and three top-10 results. As he reels at 17th place in the points table, he spoke to SiriusXM NASCAR Radio ahead of the Darlington race this Sunday and explained his predicament.
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He said, “When you get in a situation like this, you start to hit the panic button a little bit. You’re trying a lot of new things. You’re just swinging the bat at anything you can think of. You’re just trying to find a direction cuz you get a little bit lost. We have got to do something different. Which direction do we go? It’s not a great place to be if I’m being real.”
Logano’s #22 Team Penske group, or even the entire Ford camp, have struggled to the 2024 Dark Horse Mustang past the checkered flag this season. Without a single victory lane visit yet, they’re quickly running out of options for betterment. Noting the same, the former Cup champion notes how they can only do so much by maximizing the horsepower and the downforce.
“You start to hit the panic button a little bit […] it’s not a great place to be, if I’m being real.”@joeylogano weighs in on the struggles the No. 22 team, @Team_Penske and @FordPerformance are dealing with 12 races into the season.
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— SiriusXM NASCAR Radio (Ch. 90) (@SiriusXMNASCAR) May 9, 2024
When neither of them works out, they have to turn to tuning the car setups. And the current benchmark in that zone for Logano is RFK Racing. He threw light on how the #17 [Chris Buescher] and #6 [Brad Keselowski] teams have managed to race well on high-speed tracks. “When you look at ride height pictures, they’re different than us,” he said. “How they get it to work? We don’t know. We try and it doesn’t work.”
Logano takes inspiration from the good work of RFK Racing in 2024
Though he isn’t able to pinpoint what it is that the RFK Racing crews are doing to make their cars race better on fast tracks, Logano sees a lot of promise for his team in it. He said that the work of RFK just proved that there was more space for Team Penske to improve and that they’ll have to figure out a way to do that. “It shows the potential is there if we can just figure it out,” he concluded.
The difference in speed between the cars parked in the garages of Team Penske and RFK Racing shows that there might yet be hope for the Mustang Dark Horse in the Cup scene. With Toyotas and Chevrolets battling it after the one-third mark of the season, it’s high time the Blue Oval threw a few punches of its own.
