Joey Logano finishing ninth in the standings to secure his spot in the Chase, especially as one of the Championship favorites, has to be one of the great comeback stories of the Team Penske driver’s career.
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He dropped to 20th in the standings after a miserable 24th-place finish at Sonoma in June. But since his dominant win at North Wilkesboro ended a 45-race winless streak, he has been steadily climbing the standings. Logano won again at Richmond, leaving him just 65 points behind leader Denny Hamlin after the Chase points reset. If there is anything that we have understood from the Team Penske 22 Ford driver, it is that he loves pressure.
But does that make him a psychopath for not wanting things easy and wanting to be under constant pressure? That’s exactly what NASCAR journalist John Newby asked Logano, who had a rather interesting answer.
“I might be,” said the three-time Cup Series winner. “I just know nothing big happens in life if you don’t put pressure on it. If it’s easy to do, you’re probably not accomplishing anything that matters in life. Most likely, the hard things are the things that move the needle in your life. It could be with your family; it could be having kids; it could be whatever. All those things are hard to do, but they move the needle one way or another.”
Logano said that pressure doesn’t come from being a couch potato and watching TV shows. He specified that being laid back and doing nothing isn’t something he is interested in.
“I don’t know if that’s a psychopath or not, but it sounds like a little bit, but I want to do something,” added Logano. “And I have the platform to make a big move here right now. And who knows how many more opportunities I have at it. So yeah, that’s real pressure moments because maybe I won’t have another shot.”
Logano is currently 36 years old. His retirement isn’t on the cards just yet, but the way his season went, sitting nearer to the bottom of the table for a majority of the season, has clearly made him see that being in contention for the title every season is not a given, despite his resume.
The Chase gets underway at Darlington this weekend. While this time it features 16 drivers, the last time the Chase was NASCAR’s postseason format, back in 2013, it was just 12 drivers. Logano and Hamlin are the only two drivers who drove when the Chase was around the last time.
“I don’t know if it really changes a whole bunch,” said Logano to journalist Peter Stratta, who asked him whether he will hold an advantage. “They call it the Chase. It’s still way different than what the Chase was then; the way the seeding is, and the separation of the fields are just different. And we have stages now too. So it just has the same name.”
The points system is also different this time. When NASCAR last used a similar format in 2013, the top 10 drivers qualified for the Chase, along with two wildcards. The wildcards went to the drivers ranked 11th to 20th with the most regular-season wins. At the reset, the top 10 started with 2,000 points, plus three bonus points for each regular-season win, while the wildcards started with 2,000 points and no bonus points.
This time around, there are no bonus points for wins, there are no wildcard entries, and the table is compact, with Hamlin on 2100 points and 16th-place Ryan Preece on 2000 points.
Logano has shown how quickly a 100-point deficit can disappear over just two or three races. The gap he faced against Hamlin before the Chase reset may have seemed too large to overcome, but at 65 points, the deficit now looks much more manageable over the 10-race Chase.
Logano wants his fourth title badly, but to get there he will have to be consistently at the top of the pack. Not just the recent consistency he has shown. He needs to be more consistent than Denny Hamlin, the driver most have locked in as the favourite, the only driver who hasn’t had a DNF this season.