Joey Logano had a slow start to the 2024 season, going 19 races before winning at Nashville, but the No. 22 team didn’t use the lack of early success as an excuse to have a rebuilding season. The team soldiered on, won three races and found themselves in the Championship 4 and Logano has the opportunity to win his third NASCAR Cup Series title.
“We’re able to really recover seasons and that’s something I’m really proud of because there’s a lot of teams that would look at it and say we’re going to call it a rebuilding year,” Logano told Newsweek and other journalists. “And the sports teams call them rebuilding years as an excuse for sucking. We don’t do that. We’re going to go to work and try to figure out how to be better and salvage a year. And I’d say we did a good job of that.”
If Logano continues his upward trajectory this season and wins a NASCAR Cup Series championship he will join Lee Petty, David Pearson, Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip and Tony Stewart as fellow three-time Cup Series champions. That’s a strong company to keep and it will likely secure his way into the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
“Yeah, I mean, obviously it (winning a third championship) would be great,” Logano said. “I guess when it comes to individually, I don’t think about it that much. I think of it more of a team ’cause I know what a championship is worth to everybody. I think that matters more. The individual piece of saying you got three of ’em, like that’s great, don’t get me wrong. I think ’cause I’m still doing it, I guess I don’t look at that that much. But I’d like to see the people that I care about at our race team celebrate.”
Phoenix has been good for Logano and the possibility for a third championship this Sunday is quite reasonable. In 31 career starts at Phoenix Raceway, Logano has three race wins, 8 Top 5 finishes, 16 Top 10 finishes, two pole positions, and an average finish of 13.5. Logano is the elder statesman among his Championship 4 peers and uses that as an advantage.
“We feel solid about our position,” Logano said. “I told everyone we’re going to old man them to death. That’s our goal. That’s our advantage, is that we got the experience over all of ’em. You do something more than once, you get better at it. You do it more than three times, you get better at it. For us, we’ve been able to kind of put together a program to where we know how to prepare and we feel comfortable in these scenarios now.”
The post NASCAR News: Joey Logano Rebounds From Slow Start to Championship 4 appeared first on Newsweek.
