Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Chicago Street Race Media Availability
Friday, July 4, 2025
Joey Logano, driver of the No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Mustang Dark Horse for Team Penske in the NASCAR Cup Series, stopped by the media center today at the Chicago Street Race to talk about this weekend and his recent ESPY nomination.
JOEY LOGANO, No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Mustang Dark Horse – YOU ARE NOMINATED FOR AN ESPY AND YOU ARE GOING TO THE CEREMONY. WHAT IS IT LIKE TO HAVE A NIGHT WHERE SPORTS IS CELEBRATED TO THE CALIBER THAT IT IS AT THE ESPYS? “For somebody that likes watching sports and enjoys that, going to the ESPYS alone is a really cool opportunity – to see everybody and meet a lot of people. You’ve got to take advantage of that opportunity, but being nominated is really cool. I don’t know how many words you can really say to describe it. You just look at the other drivers that are in the running as well, I mean, they’re world-class drivers, so to have your name even mentioned with them is a pretty special thing, for sure. Hopefully, it goes really well. You never know how it works, but I’ll be there if we do win. I’ll be as surprised as anybody and it’ll be a fun experience either way and worth the trip, for sure.”
DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE PART OF THIS CIRCUIT? “It’s probably Victory Lane, I just haven’t seen it yet (laughing). Up to this moment, it’s been the ride home. Hopefully, it’s not like that this time. This track is very challenging in its own way. When you look at turns one and six, you have no run off, so there aren’t many street courses that I know of at least, where you have long straightaways with literally no run off, so the risk is huge here. When you go to push it, you send it in there a little bit too far, and we’ve seen that where a car goes straight right into the tire barrier. You don’t have the ability to make mistakes and just turn around and get back going again. It’s a little different than other road courses, where a lot of times you’ll maybe overdrive the car to find the limits in practice and stuff like that. You can’t afford to do that here. You push it a little too hard and you’ll crash. You lock up the tires and wheel hop in there you’re gonna hit the wall. It’s a different approach for sure. That on top of the bumps and the track is just unpredictable for those reasons. You think you’re in a good spot, but if you’re off line a couple feet you hit a new bump you didn’t know was there and the next thing you know, you’re going for a ride so you look at some of these corners. They’re really tricky. They’re tight. Is there one part better than the others? I don’t know. You just have a lot of different variables that you don’t typically have even at other road courses. You think about the way the road crowns. There’s something different. Going over bridges and those bumps and different textures and all the different lines that are painted out there. There are a lot of different things going on than what we typically have. Obviously, we don’t have curbing, so you hit the wall if you get too close. The risk is very, very high when you’re trying to make speed here.”
TURN 10 HAS A NOTORIOUS BUMP BY THE FOUNTAIN. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT BUMP? “It’s sketch. You’re kind of booking around the waterfall there and then you’re switching directions and you’re going down that little chute. It’s two lanes wide and surprisingly when you watch these races back, people make passes through there, which is wild because it’s so tight. You feel like you’re going really fast, but you’re really not. It’s such a tight area that you feel like you’re booking it and the car, again, is bouncing all over the place. That’s another part of the track, too, when it rained and if it does again, that part of the track doesn’t dry very well. Just kind of being at the bottom of the hill there, it seems like the water kind of puddles up there more and takes longer to dry. I don’t know if the sun doesn’t quite get there as good. Either way, that was the part of the track that stayed the most wet throughout the whole race. It’s tricky through there, for sure, especially when it’s raining and you don’t know what your grip level is every lap. You’re like, ‘Is it gonna be slicker or is it going to be more grip?’ If it catches you off guard, you’re wrecked.”
DO YOU GET INVOLVED IN ANY OF THE DISCUSSIONS AROUND WHETHER WE SHOULD KEEP RACING HERE IN CHICAGO OR GO SOMEWHERE ELSE? “No, I do not get in the middle of that. Speaking for myself and maybe some of the driver council and those type of things, we try to help whether it’s a new venue or a venue we’ve gone to and adjustments that we think would be better. A great example of that was Mexico City. When we were there, whether it’s the tire barriers that you’ve seen in a lot of the corners through the esses, that was all through the driver council and Jeff Burton and everybody working together with NASCAR to help make sure that the race is officiated correctly and puts on the best racing possible for the fans. I feel like that’s one of the main roles for the council is, so whether that’s racing here in Chicago, there can be suggestions on what we can do better, and we’ve voiced those and wherever the next one may be, if it’s here again, if it’s somewhere else, whatever happens, we’d like to be in the middle of those discussions of some of the things we’d like to see on track and even off track for the experience, for the drivers, the teams and the fans.”
LAST WEEK WAS THE FIRST LOOK AT THE NEW DVP POLICY AS FAR AS LOTS OF CARS AND WHAT YOU CAN FIX AND WHAT YOU CAN’T. ARE YOU COMFORTABLE WITH WHAT YOU SAW LAST WEEK? “We didn’t fix much. I didn’t get to really experience the full thing as we were just parked on pit road and it was done with the radiator knocked out of it and that’s not on the list. It’s funny watching your videos of the garage. It looked like a parking garage (laughing). It’s kind of wild to see that many cars wiped out there, but it’s part of the game. I guess it went fairly smooth. I watched on TV and from there I watched the lift system work for a couple cars. That was neat to see that actually go into effect and see a car stuck, they plugged it in and drove off. That was cool. That’s a start. I wasn’t in the middle of any DVP nor were any of our cars to speak of to know any little details and things like that, but it seems like the rules are pretty clear.”
IS THIS AN EXERCISE IN PATIENCE DRIVING ON THIS TRACK? “Yeah, it’s easy to say that until Shane is out there a second faster than you and you have to go put yourself in some uncomfortable situations. It’s easy to say that, but you’ve got to figure out how to go fast and last I checked with this car there’s no going fast in your comfort zone. You just have to be pushing outside of where you feel like you’re comfortable and this track is no exception to it. If anything, it’s just a little bit more out of your comfort zone, probably because we haven’t done it much. We’re not road racers to speak of. There’s only one out there that really is and so all of us are, in a way, playing catch-up.”
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE NASCAR BALANCE THE DIFFERENCE OF TAKING THE SPORT INTO NEW VENUES WITH ESTABLISHING A FOOTHOLD IN A MARKET LIKE DOWNTOWN CHICAGO AND BEING ABLE TO KEEP THOSE NEW FANS COMING AFTER THREE YEARS? “I can probably go a couple different directions on that. I’m always a big fan of going to new facilities because it’s worked every single time. I’ve got to go back to just thinking about early in my career when we never did anything like this. It was the same schedule every year for decades. Nothing changed. A big change would be like moving a date a couple weeks from where it was. It wasn’t changing anything. Now we’re going to new venues. You think of Road America, we’re not too far from there, and that was a huge success. The L.A. Coliseum, the first couple of years was a huge success. I think if you do it too long it gets stale. I think there are tracks that are part of our roots that we must go to, but I think there’s a handful of tracks that should be on a three-year term kind of thing that you can just move around and go to new places. Look at what happened at Bowman Gray this year – a huge success, a new track. People love going to see something new. The unknown. The uncertainty of all the teams not knowing what to do. It’s fun to watch. You have an idea now of what Chicago is gonna look like. We know what Richmond looks like. We know what Daytona is gonna look like. When you go to a new facility you don’t know. What was Bowman Gray gonna look like? We don’t really know until we get there, so I think the newness is important to keep something like that going on in our schedule. That’s just my opinion, though.”
THOUGHTS ON HAVING FOUR ROAD COURSES IN NINE RACES? “We’ve got to do them, so I’m kind of good either way. I just think in the playoffs you need to have a good mixture of racetracks throughout the 10 weeks, but the other regular season races, I mean, if we’re gonna do them, then I don’t really care. Whatever works best for the schedule and weather and fans and that type of stuff is fine with me.”
NEXT MONTH IT WILL HAVE BEEN A DECADE SINCE YOU LAST CUP WIN ON A ROAD COURSE. IS THERE ANY ADDITIONAL MOTIVATION WHEN COMING HERE TO PROVE YOU CAN NOT ONLY CONTEND BUT BEAT THESE NEW ROAD RACERS? “You just gave me one, not that I needed it (laughing). I honestly feel like I have to prove myself every day. I always say that what you did yesterday is yesterday. Tell me what you’re gonna do tomorrow. That’s the important stuff. The history books and people’s memories are short. People say, and I say too, you’re only as good as your last race and it really feels that way a lot of times. I’ve had a great career. You’re right, a lot of great accomplishments and really cool moments. Have I hit all the markers that I set out to hit? No, I haven’t, so I’ve still got plenty to go out there and want to achieve, for sure.”
IF WEATHER IS A FACTOR ON SUNDAY, IS IT MORE COMFORTING KNOWING YOU’VE EXPERIENCED THAT HERE IN PREVIOUS YEARS? MORE COMFORTING THAN THE FIRST TIME? “You know at least what you’re getting into. Comfortable? Never. I don’t think so, but since the first time here, I mean, you look at all the rain races that we’ve had and the one that stands out the most to probably everyone is the one at COTA that was like, ‘OK, that’s too far.’ Now we’ve gotten to the point where we can go out there and make laps and race. We know what the right amount of spray is so we can see and feel safe out there, and you can tell the drivers have all gotten much better at it. The first time we were rain racing we were all tip toeing around and everyone was going wicked slow. It was like, ‘What are we doing?’ Now it’s like, instead of survival is what it was to start, like just don’t crash, now they feel better about it. They’re more comfortable. They’re more aggressive. They’re out there racing now all the way through the field. You used to see maybe the top 10 cars really racing each other and feeling comfortable enough to get after it, and everyone else was like, ‘if I just don’t crash here, I’m gonna finish in the top 10.’ Now, that’s not good enough anymore. The level keeps going up, just like everything else. Everyone has just done more rain racing now to know what to expect as far as grip levels and things they cannot pull off. It’s fun to watch, though. I do think the rain racing is interesting, especially when you get to the tire strategy piece. At what point do you put slicks on versus the wet tire. It gets pretty interesting really quick.”
YOU DID A VIDEO RECENTLY ON SOCIAL MEDIA WHERE YOU WENT UNDERCOVER WITH A DISGUISE AND GAVE A FORD DEALERSHIP SALESMAN A RIDE. DO YOU ENJOY DOING STUFF LIKE THAT? “That was a blast. Backstory. This was literally the week after we won the championship at Phoenix. We went to Huntersville Ford in North Carolina. I’m friends with a lot of people there and this is Ford’s idea. They’ve done this a couple other times with other drivers and they brought this up to me and I’m like, ‘Yes. This is what I live for. I want to do that so bad.’ So, I went undercover. I was a chicken farmer from Arkansas, my wife and I. We just moved to North Caroline and we wanted to get a family vehicle. That was the story behind the whole thing and we ended up giving a salesman named Joe, great guy, we scared the hell out of him and made a lot of good jokes. Unfortunately, apparently, a lot of the things we said were not OK, so a lot of it got cut out (laughing). It’s amazing. We’ve got the raw footage, which I’m trying to put it all together so I can post some things I can. There’s more to come, I will say that. The actual video, the real thing turned out great, but we’re gonna try to get all of the outtakes and put them together and do some more cool content behind it. It was definitely a fun experience and we got him. He had no idea, which is crazy. I figured eventually he was gonna figure this out, but it definitely was a wild experience for Joe.”
