Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
South Point 400 Advance | Las Vegas Motor Speedway
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
Joey Logano, driver of the No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Mustang Dark Horse for Team Penske in the NASCAR Cup Series, will be competing in the Round of 8 which begins this weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The two-time champion opens the round in eighth place, 11 points below the cut line. He was a guest earlier today as part of a NASCAR conference call in which he answered media questions. Following is a full transcript:
JOEY LOGANO, No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Mustang Dark Horse – WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION WHEN YOU HEARD THE 48 WAS BEING DISQUALIFIED AND YOU WERE IN THE ROUND OF 8? “I was obviously surprised. I heard rumors before that of a delay in tech and some of those things going on. Usually, nothing happens. It was kind of a surprise to hear that. Typically, by the time you roll the car off the scales, they give them the opportunity to put weight in the cars and you’re usually fine, but in this case that wasn’t the case and I was like, ‘Well, would we be in?’ That’s the first question you have to ask and obviously the answer was yes, and then you’re still kind of cautiously optimistic because you’re thinking, ‘Well, there probably will be an appeal if there is and we may not know until later,’ so you kind of keep going on with your life and preparing for the next race. Obviously, it came out yesterday that they’re not appealing, so we move on and into the Round of 8 and off we go.”
HOW DO YOU LOOK AT SOMEONE FAILING TECH FOR BEING TOO LIGHT? “I can’t speak on the specifics of what happened and how it happened. It’s obvious that NASCAR gives us half-a-percent of the total weight of the vehicle after the race. That rule is there for multiple reasons. In the past, obviously, there are games played there. What they are and how it works, you’re talking to the wrong guy on that, but some rules are gray that you can interpret two different ways and some are black and white. When it comes to numbers and the weight of a vehicle, it’s a little bit easier to look at and say it’s either black or white, but I can’t speak to the specifics of how it happened or what games are played and how often it happens. I can’t answer those.”
WHAT DO YOU DO WITH THIS SECOND CHANCE? HOW DO YOU ATTACK IT? “The same way we would have if we’d made it any other way. You go out there and you attack. The positives, I feel like we’ve been steadily getting better and improving throughout the season to where we are now. I feel confident in the speed we have in our car. Kansas, we had a lot of speed and almost won the first stage there. We have to clean up a couple issues on the execution side. Talladega is Talladga. We got caught up in the big crash there, but the speed we also had this weekend at the Roval looked pretty solid to me, to where we are a Championship 4 caliber race team. The stats may not look like it. It may look like we’re underdogs from the outset looking in, but internally we feel very confident in our race team that we can make a run at this thing and get ourselves into the Championship 4. We’ve seen it in the past where you get in there and anything can happen at Phoenix. The goal right now is to look at the next three races and how do we maximize that. We can point our way in. We’re only 11 out, so it’s not a lot of points by no means. It can happen very quickly, so one race at a time. Right now, the focus is Vegas and we’ll try to maximize the day there.”
YOU ARE A THREE-TIME WINNER AT VEGAS. DO YOU FEEL YOU HAVE A STRONG OPPORTUNITY THERE TO WIN OR GET YOURSELF SOLIDLY IN THE TOP FOUR? “We’ve done it before, we can do it again.”
ON PIT ROAD YOU SAID YOU WERE ANGRY AT THE MOMENT. WHAT WERE YOUR EMOTIONS IN THE CAR ON THE WAY HOME WHEN YOU STARTED TO HEAR THE RUMORS? “I was starting to move forward. You get there literally the moment we get out of the race car. It takes a little bit to get your thoughts collected and, honestly, by the time I was driving home my wife and I were talking about something far more important than what we were doing at the racetrack. My mind was already starting to shift on what were the next moves and kind of getting over the race. Then I started hearing the rumors from there and the phone started to ring shortly after.”
WHEN YOU GET A RARE SECOND CHANCE IS THAT MOTIVATING EVEN JUST A LITTLE BIT? “I don’t know if they let us in. The race is something that starts the day they start building the race car. That’s when the race starts. You guys see the results every weekend and what goes on during the race, but weeks beforehand is when the race starts and so that all matters. We talk about how this is a team sport and it takes everybody that builds the race car to make this work, and we were able to do what we needed to do at the Roval to move forward. Now, does it motivate us more that we’re in still? No. I mean, we’re a motivated race team any way you look at it. The parts that I was most proud about after the Roval was that we showed up with our backs up against the wall in a situation where we needed to really show up and we qualified well, we scored the second-most points on the day. The goal was to score a bunch of points. We missed that by one point. I feel like we had a championship-winning execution when it comes to road courses when you have to not flip the stages and you have to take the stage points and put yourself behind at some point. It’s really hard to get a solid finish after doing that and I’m proud of the team for being able to accomplish that.”
WE’VE SEEN THE PENSKE TEAMS GET STRONGER AS THE PLAYOFFS MOVE FORWARD IN PAST YEARS. HOW DOES THAT COMPARE TO WHAT YOU’RE SEEING THIS SEASON? “Trends are trends for a reason, right? I don’t know why or what that is, but it does seem like Team Penske does a good job rising to the occasion when it matters during the playoffs. I feel like that happened a little sooner this year. We started to make that turnaround a little bit quicker than last year and still last year Blaney was able to win the championship. Yeah, I feel great about it because we’ve done this before. Like I said before, from the outside looking in you look at it and say, ‘Well, they haven’t had as many top fives. They haven’t had as many top 10s. They haven’t been as competitive.’ Who cares? We’ve lived this story many times before. Yeah, would it be easier if you had more playoff points? Yeah, but you know what? You win this weekend and you’re sitting as the favorite going into Phoenix, so it changes like that and that’s with the playoff system that we have. Every point matters throughout the whole season. I’m not discounting that, but you have to be your absolute best at this point in the season or else those points don’t even matter, so I feel confident in our team that we’ve got that. We’re still alive. We’re still going and that’s the name of the game in these playoffs. You just have to stay alive long enough. I said it last year that we did not accomplish that. This year, we’re gonna keep the pressure on all the way through.”
HENDRICK HAD UNTIL 5 PM TO APPEAL. WHAT WAS THAT UNCERTAINTY LIKE AS YOU WENT THROUGH YOUR NORMAL PROCESS THAT THINGS COULD CHANGE AGAIN? “To be honest with you, you control the things that you can control. I don’t work at Hendrick. I don’t know the situation that happened and how it happened. I can’t sway their opinion on whether they’re gonna appeal it or not, so what am I gonna do? All I can do is do us at that point – do what we typically do, which is our typical Monday and go through it and prepare for the next weekend. Does the goal change because we’re in the Round of 8 versus not? No, because we were still in the owner’s championship anyway. We still had that that we needed to continue to fight for, so the goal doesn’t change, the strategy wouldn’t have changed. Nothing changes in our minds because that owner’s piece of this whole thing is ultra important. That’s where the money is at. We don’t talk about it much, but it’s important, so we wouldn’t have changed our mindset one bit.”
CAN YOU EMPATHIZE WITH WHAT ALEX BOWMAN MUST HAVE FELT WHEN HE FOUND OUT BECAUSE YOU GUYS DON’T PREPARE THE CAR? “Yeah. It’s hard. I’ve been there. If you’ve done this stuff long enough you as a driver find yourself in these scenarios and it’s not easy from any level. One, you’ve got to answer questions from you guys. The impact that it makes for your race team. There’s nothing good that comes out of it and it’s frustrating on top of it, but, like I said, I don’t know how it happened – if it’s a mistake or something, I don’t know. Is it was something that was intentional? Is it something they just pushed too far? I don’t know. That probably affects the way you think after something like this happens.”
WHAT ARE THE EMOTIONS LIKE KNOWING YOU ARE GOING TO ONE OF YOUR BEST TRACKS IN VEGAS? “Like I said, you’re right back in it and the goal was the same, whether we were in the driver’s championship still or not. The owner’s side of it still mattered to us, so the mindset doesn’t change. The energy doesn’t change. We’re still going out there to maximize the day and win it if we can. That’s the goal, so I can’t say it changed much. Did it bring some excitement that this piece of it is still there? Yeah, absolutely. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel that way, but it doesn’t change much from the way it affects us as a race team.”
WHAT IS THE KEY TO WINNING AND HAVING SUCCESS AT HOMESTEAD? “I would say Miami, I think every driver loves going there because there are just so many options. You can run the very bottom. You can run the very top. There’s a lot of tire fall off. It makes it very challenging to set up your race car because do you want to be good on the short run or the long run? I always pick both. Can we get everything? But a lot of times you have to compromise and pick something to be stellar and it’s fun because you have a lot of those challenges you have to go through throughout the day and strategy. I can’t say I’ve completely looked at the strategy yet and the tire limits of how that works there, but there if there are a lot of cautions you can run up against your tire allotment pretty quickly there because you’re gonna want them pretty much any chance you can, so it makes for a really fun track. I think everyone enjoys going to Miami. I think the teams, not just the drivers, I think everyone likes going down there this time of year anyways.”
IS THIS SORT OF A SURREAL YEAR FOR YOU? “It’s NASCAR, man. I don’t know what to tell you. Expect the unexpected. You’ve got to go and just roll with the punches and go with the flow and just continue on. I feel like these days more and more there are just seasons like this. There’s just more crazy things that can happen than ever before and a lot of that is due to the Next Gen car, but it just seems like the simple – last night I was putting my son to bed and he likes reading those yearbooks on how the season went. We were reading one from ‘20 or ‘21, I’m not sure, and he started reading the finishing order and the top 10 was almost the same every weekend. It was the same top 10 drivers and now you look at the top 10 and it’s different every week. There are people in and out of that thing. It’s not like you’re clicking off twenty-something top 10s. There’s 10 cars doing that throughout the year. It doesn’t happen anymore. The game has changed. This car has completely changed everything that we used to know about NASCAR and now, like I said, I just go with it because it’s just the craziest things we do now. You look at the way we race on the track, the tracks that we go to, you name it and it can happen.”
WHAT DO YOU ENJOY DOING WHEN YOU COME TO VEGAS BESIDES THE TRACK, AND LARSON HAS WON TWICE IN A ROW THERE. IS HE ONE OF THE GUYS TO BEAT THIS WEEKEND? “The Vegas entertainment part, you’re talking to someone who might be a little boring when you’re talking about Vegas since you’re just going there for a work trip. I’m there to win a race, so if you want to know what the most fun thing to do there is there’s a place inside the racetrack called Victory Lane. That’s the best place to be in Vegas, so I’m gonna try to drive my car there and enjoy my time when I get there. Until then, I’m not gonna be working. As far as the competitor there, yeah, you look at the top eight right now and you can pick and choose any of them. They’re all really strong. You can look at it and if you were to look at the playoffs when they started, those are probably gonna be the majority of the cars that everyone would pick to be in this round. There is no one that is knocked out of the playoffs right now that you would say, ‘Man, that is a big surprise.’ There’s no one that had a ton of playoff points that got knocked out is what I’m trying to say, so all the cars that are in it are tough. I don’t think you can discount anybody going to Vegas.”
TEAM PENSKE WON THE IMSA WEATHERTECH GTP CHAMPIONSHIP. DO ANY OF THE ENGINEERS OR PEOPLE WITH THAT TEAM WORK WITH YOUR TEAM? “No, as closely as a lot of us work together it’s still so different. Those cars are light years different than what we race. I know we are a step closer to that direction with the Next Gen car, but you hear some stories about their races and race cars in talking to drivers and you’re like, ‘Huh.’ That’s still a lot different, so I don’t there’s a whole bunch of information that is transferred back and forth between those cars. They’re still very different.”
WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT MARTINSVILLE. AS A DRIVER CAN YOU TAKE ME THROUGH WHAT IT’S LIKE FROM THE TIME YOU WAKE UP UNTIL WHEN THE RACE ENDS? “It depends on the scenario you’re in because by the time you get to Martinsville you know what you have to do. You already went through Vegas. You already went through Miami, so you have an idea of like, ‘OK, am I do or die? Do I have to win the race or I’m out? Or, maybe you’ve already won and you don’t have to worry about it at all, or you’re pointing your way in or a similar scenario that we were in at the Roval, so it’s too early to say how you’re gonna feel that morning, but that’s what you’re gonna have to work through. We’ve seen crazy things happen there. What Ross did a couple years ago. You never know what’s gonna happen.”
