After the cycle of scheduled green flag pit stops completed, it looked as though Joey Logano could simply cruise to victory without any worries as he had a solid two second lead on teammate Brad Keselowski as the laps ticked down.
“You got a pretty sizable lead, really all you’re thinking is, ‘Where is the white flag? Where is the white flag?’,” Logano recalled his thoughts from those final laps. “Brad was able to catch us a little bit. Then you go into turn one, you see the 41 up against the wall. You’re like, ‘Please no caution, please no caution’. Boom, it comes out. You got to be kidding me.”
At that moment, Logano says a driver’s first reaction is to scream and yell due to being frustrated, however he knew he had to stay calm and give crew chief Todd Gordon the information that he needed to make the right call.
“Really, I was so mad, I didn’t really tell him what the car did until I was coming down pit road,” Logano said. “He made a last-minute decision to put fuel in it because I heard, No fuel, no fuel. I was like, No, no, no, I was tight. He made the right decision at the last minute to put fuel in the car, give me a better balance for what I needed, the guys made the money stop, put us out as the first car with four tires on, restarted third.”
Jeff Gordon and Brian Vickers both chose to take two tires, therefore taking up the front row. Knowing that he was going to start third, Logano says that’s when he started to plan his attack based on the fact that Kyle Busch was to his outside.
“I know he’s very aggressive on restarts, very good on restarts,” Logano commented. “My number one goal at that point was try to figure out how he doesn’t get clean air and get out to the front. I had to make sure he didn’t stick it three-wide, get in the middle, do something like that.”
Luckily the restart played out well as Gordon got a good restart, allowing Logano to follow on the bottom and grab the second spot. From there, Logano was able to get alongside Gordon and clear him on the last lap to take the victory.
“Just awesome,” Logano commented. “We’ve been in contention every race this year to win these things. To get the Shell-Pennzoil Ford in Victory Lane, it means a lot. It’s such a tough racetrack. We have had plenty of time to think about this the last couple days. Pretty cool place to win. I got a ring, guns, a trophy, a hat, a duck call. That’s pretty cool.”
Logano has been in contention to win multiple times this year so far – but yet this is the first victory that he has snatched. Logano admits that it can be frustrating at times to have a winning car and not capitalize on getting the win.
“On the flipside of that, you got winning cars, it’s a lot better to struggle than finish 10th, so I’m proud of that,” Logano added. “You’re able to ride that momentum of having fast racecars at every racetrack. You never know when it will end, of having great racecars. When you have those opportunities like today, like we’ve had this year so far, you need to capitalize on it.
“Obviously these wins are so important this year to get into the Chase. To have both Team Penske cars with a win already, both of us up there in points, we feel good about that. You can kind of start getting your ducks in a row for Chase time, making sure you get everything ready for then. You’re not playing on the backside of your foot trying to win a race a couple races before Richmond. You feel a little bit more comfortable now than what we would have been.”
