Not many believed that Team Penske’s Joey Logano would win his third Cup Series championship in 2024. The only thing that favored him at the start of the season was the even-year superstition. Even that grew hazy with the weeks passing by after the season-opening Daytona 500, which he failed to finish. Subpar performances consistently fueled finishes outside the top 10.
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By mid-May, he’d become one of the drivers on the field with the worst average finish rates. It was amid this dryness that he came out of the blue to win the All-Star race in North Wilkesboro.
Speaking on the Rubbin is Racing podcast recently, he said he couldn’t have won the event without the Goodyear tire test in March and believed the same to be his season’s turning point.
“I feel like the turning point is — we had a tire test in North Wilkesboro,” he noted. “We get no tests all year. We get one. We learned a lot that day. Those two days. Hundreds of laps. Those days gave us the speed we needed.”
“We won the All-Star race… I think that’s what propelled us all the way through.” He added that his team had applied a lot of learnings from the test in the season finale at Phoenix.
Logano took part in the test alongside William Byron and Ty Gibbs. They were tasked with trying out different tire compounds from Goodyear and providing their feedback on them.
The No. 22 driver knew that it was a blessing in disguise and used the experience to his advantage. The All-Star win gave him a big boost in confidence and sent a whole lot of momentum his way.
The after-effects of winning the 2024 All-Star race
Logano led 199 of the 200 laps in the All-Star race. He hadn’t displayed such dominance before in the season. He won again just a few weeks later, in Nashville this time. It was his first points-paying victory of the year and secured him a spot in the playoffs. However, his performance did not pick up from there till the beginning of the postseason.
He won the very first race of the playoffs, in Atlanta, and sent a strong message across the board. It was the first time that the crowds began wondering if he could contend for the title after such a mediocre season. But that’s what he ended up doing courtesy of some timely luck and another win in Las Vegas.
The finale in Phoenix was another dominant display from him along with the All-Star race win. He had good speed in his Mustang and used it to deploy strong defensive tactics against his competitors. He ended up as a three-time champion on the final day of the long season. To think all this began from a tire test on a short track.
