Joey Logano gets Candid on his Worst Early Season Slump in 16-Years Career
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USA Today via Reuters
Feb 16, 2024; Daytona Beach, Florida, USA; NASCAR Cup Series driver Joey Logano (22) during practice for the Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway. Mandatory Credit: John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports
It’s no secret that the 2024 Cup Series season hasn’t been very kind to Joey Logano. At the very start of the year, the Team Penske driver kicked off things with a very ugly run-in with Ty Gibbs off the track, prompting Kyle Busch to consider if current drivers had gone too soft. Speaking of which, Logano’s year has certainly gone soft in terms of his results, with wreck after wreck ruining any chances of the 33-year-old improving his 30th place standing in the Cup Series. In the sixteen years since Logano entered the Cup Series, no season has started so poorly. This prompted Logano to reveal the ‘hole’ that the #22 Penske garage seems to have gotten itself into.
“It just never started like this’ – Joey Logano comes to terms with his misfortunes
During the 2023 season, Joey Logano was the man to beat and he had strong hopes of continuing down that path. While he ultimately fell short to Ryan Blaney, the #22 Penske Ford still had a great run, bringing home 1 win, 11 top fives, and 17 top 10s. Fast-forward to 2024, and Logano doesn’t seem to be having nearly as much stride as last season.
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After the first five races of the 2024 season, Joey Logano has only managed to finish in the top ten once, with the rest of the results rarely being better than a 30th-place finish. Naturally, Logano is aware of the pressure on the #22 Team to get up to speed with his teammate, Ryan Blaney who sits in first place on the standings. Compared to Logano’s 51 points, Blaney has 151 points and 3 top 5s, placing him well above the rest of the Ford drivers.
With that said, Logano candidly explained the position of the #22 garage. He shared with FrontStretch, “We just keep fighting, right? Just the process you know, keep grinding it out the way we know how to as a team. And to your point, we can qualify well, so just goes to show that we’ve got speed in our car, at least in qualifying trim. You know, we’ve been in quite a few wrecks earlier in the season, so yeah we’ve got ourselves in a hole right now.”
Whilst Logano felt the #22 garage had been quite unlucky at most races, now is the time to bring home much-needed points if he wants to make it to the playoffs. Evidently, the pressure is higher than ever before. Logano added, “We’ve had portions of a season like this, it just never started like this.” Reflecting on his current situation, Logano said, “Now it’s, you start at zero and you’re still down there at zero, so, got a lot of work to do.”
It’s not that Joey Logano, one of NASCAR’s most successful drivers in the last decade, has just lost his ability to be a frontrunner. The combination of Mustang Darkhorse’s lackluster pace with Logano’s unlucky DNFs has made the 2024 season quite a tumultuous journey for the #22 garage.
With that said, this weekend at COTA could prove to be the turning point in Logano’s miserable run. While wrecks at the road course were an unavoidable outcome in 2023, the changes brought by NASCAR to the restart zone aim to put an end to that. And Logano couldn’t be more hopeful for its success.
Can NASCAR’s COTA changes help Logano turn around those misfortunes?
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The Circuit of the Americas is one of the most beloved racetracks in all of America, known for its challenging esses and action-packed racing. However, the restart zone change that NASCAR had brought around earlier resulted in absolute carnage at the 2023 race. You see, the restart zone used to be the hallway through the final stretch before turn one. This gave drivers, who were far behind, the ability to dive-bomb the frontrunners for positions, ultimately ending in wrecks all around. According to Kyle Larson, the restart zone made drivers look like ‘amateurs’.
To fix this issue, NASCAR has decided to move the restart zone back toward the last corner, creating a natural pacemaker for the grid to break up the rows. This should greatly reduce the probability of multi-car pileups. Since Joey Logano has fallen victim to a lot of wrecks in the first few races of the season, the #22 driver is hopeful that NASCAR’s changes to the restart zone at COTA will help reduce that tendency.
He shared with FrontStretch, “I think the restart zone is a good move, hopefully, it’s enough, I’m not sure if it is or not yet but it’ll definitely separate the field some. Maybe not the first three rows, but after that it’ll definitely have some separation, so that’ll be good so it’s not as crazy as when we get to turn one. It still will be, don’t get me wrong, but I think it’ll be better.”
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Now that Joey Logano has high hopes of making a comeback at COTA, only time will tell if NASCAR’s restart zone changes have helped improve the #22 affinity to race-ending wrecks.
Written by:
Edited by:
Shreya Singh