Ford Racing NSCS Notes & Quotes:
NSCS Ford EcoBoost 400 – Homestead Miami Speedway
Sunday Nov. 16, 2014
JOEY LOGANO POST RACE PRESS CONFERENCE
JOEY LOGANO, No. 22 Shell Pennzoil Ford Fusion – TALK ABOUT HOW THINGS PLAYED OUT FOR THE 22 CAR. “Obviously not too good. This has been an awesome season for the whole 22 bunch. We were up there is a lot of top-fives and a lot of wins. Coming into today we knew what we had to do, we just didn’t execute. From every angle it seems like. I got the wall early in the race and lost the shape in the car and lost a little track position for that. We were able to recover toward the end of the race to where we were all in line and then we came down pit road and I just had a mistake on pit road and we went all the way to the tail end of the lead lap there. We were trying to fight back with 15 to go but unfortunately a great season like that makes the overall finish fourth because of one mistake but that is what the rules are. We understand that. This team did a great job of consistently being fast. In previous years that would have been perfect. Coming into this race and the way the points go, it doesn’t pay anymore. We just didn’t execute perfectly tonight and for that reason we will finish fourth. We still feel like we did a lot better than fourth this season.”
YOU HAD MISCUES ON PIT ROAD. DID THE PRESSURE GET TO YOUR GUYS AT THE END? “Obviously I haven’t re watched the pit stop or what happened there yet but when you are pushing hard to try to make 11 second pit stops or better mistakes happen. We can’t have that happen. We can’t afford to have a mistake like that. Without re watching the tape I am not going to say it was pressure or what it was. We were all trying hard to go as fast as we can. It is like everyone running as fast as you can out there and eventually you make a mistake. We knew coming into this race you can’t afford to make one mistake to put yourself behind. We made a couple tonight which put us back. Obviously our pit crew has done a good job this year. I am not putting them down over one thing. It was just bad timing on one of them.”
DURING THAT PIT STOP, WHAT WERE YOUR EMOTIONS AND DID YOU KNOW YOU WERE DONE? “I did not have good emotions in the car. I was pretty pissed off if that is an emotion. You knew your chances went down a lot. I didn’t say it was over. We didn’t give up. At that point I was trying to pass as many cars as we could and really hoped those guys wrecked each other. That is all I had going for me at that point. When you are that far back, 24th or 25th, you can’t make that up with 12 to go or whatever it was. It is just too hard to make that up. All you can do is try. It was an amazing opportunity to be here and it would be dumb to give up. You keep trying and hopefully something happens. We put ourselves in that boat to have to have to be able to pull that out. It was too hard.”
WHAT WAS THIS EXPERIENCE LIKE? “This was an awesome experience. This is the first time I have had a shot at winning a championship and the first time I won more than one race in a season. It has been a spectacular year. I have a biased opinion right now and I am probably too close to the fire to comment much on how it went. As the car that scored more points than anyone in the Chase it is hard to say you are in love with it but I think it was a good thing for the sport and the race was exciting today. It is unfortunate we didn’t execute today but it was a great experience and we had fun with it and learned a lot for next time in my career that we get to compete for a championship and how to maybe do a few things differently and learn from my mistakes.”
