Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
WWTR Media Availability
Wednesday, September 3, 2025
Defending NASCAR Cup Series champion Joey Logano goes into this weekend’s second race in the Round of 16 below the cut line by three points. Logano, who won the debut series race at World Wide Technology Raceway in 2022, was part of a NASCAR media call this afternoon and talked about his expectations for this weekend and the rest of the season.
JOEY LOGANO, No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Mustang Dark Horse – DID YOU HAVE A SENSE OF WHAT HAPPENED AT DARLINGTON? “There are some theories of things that we probably could have done better or looked at a little differently, just like we do every other race we break it down and try to understand what we did good and where we didn’t. There were a lot of good things from Darlington, most of them from the execution side of the race, but we just missed it on the raw speed side of it. It definitely wasn’t what we were looking for, there’s no doubt about that. We wanted to have a faster car and I really expected to have a faster car in Darlington considering our history there, but unfortunately we didn’t bring enough speed.”
A LOT OF GOOD TEAMS HAD SIMILAR ISSUES. WERE YOU SURPRISED SO MANY MISSED IT IN THE PLAYOFF OPENER? “Whether we missed it or the Toyotas got that much better. It’s kind of hard to answer that at times. You look at the front running cars there and they had one thing in common. There’s probably some work to be done from that standpoint as well, but we definitely weren’t the best Ford either, so we’ve got some work to do.”
HOW DO YOU FEEL THE SPORT HAS LEARNED FROM YOUR EARLIER EXPERIENCES TO CREATE BETTER SUPPORT FOR YOUNG DRIVERS? “I think the sport is different for one. Has the sport learned? I mean, every team is gonna be a little different and I think they saw what happened for me is I jumped in so early and wasn’t quite ready. Every driver is different. Every individual is different and the sport itself has changed a lot. I look at when I started, if you look at the class of drivers that were out there – all of them had been there for a long period of time, and I was pretty much the only rookie and was pretty much the only rookie for the first seven or eight years of my career. I was going up against guys that had been there a long time. There was a big age gap there. That’s one piece of it. The cars back then were, I feel like, harder to get your head wrapped around. They were so unique. When you see today, for example, we didn’t see back then with the old car where whether it’s road courses or someone like Shane can jump right in and take off. You didn’t really see that much with the old car because they were very finicky, they were very unique. There wasn’t another car like it. You had some pretty unique things there as well, so it took a little longer, I feel like, to wrap your head around it to make speed. The sport has changed, yes. I think probably the most similar situation we see right now is probably Connor (Zilisch). He’s an incredible talent. I think he’s gonna be fine, but I also think the world is a lot different than when I got here 16 years ago and whether it’s simulation, there are things you can study now. We didn’t have SMT back then, so your learning curve was just a lot steeper for a lot of different reasons, but these days the kids are starting so young, so fast. There is still gonna be a learning curve when you move up to the top league. Everyone in Cup is really, really good, so there will be a learning curve for him, but he’s gonna adapt, I think, quicker than I did.”
WAS THERE ANYTHING THAT WHEN YOU LOOK BACK WOULD HAVE SPED UP YOUR PROGRESS? “I feel like probably some of my maturity level held me back a little bit, not that I was out there doing dumb things. I was very focused in on what I was doing, but I didn’t lead my team as good as I felt like I should have. I wasn’t assertive enough. I wasn’t confident enough to do that, and I feel like that over time kind of set me back a little bit to start. A lot of it is you’ve got to have the right people around you at the right times. That team that I started with would have been great at this time of my career, but as a rookie, it was not. You just have to have the right people at the right times around you.”
WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS LOOKING AT BRISTOL WITH IT BEING AN ELIMINATION RACE? “Bristol is something we’ve talked a lot about already. On the concrete with the Next Gen car hasn’t been our wheelhouse. It’s been a good track for me in the past personally with different cars, so we haven’t really got it figured out quite yet. With that said, Goodyear is bringing a different tire and trying to promote more tire wear. All of those type of things could change a lot of things as well, so as we go through our setup and things you want to change, there’s a lot of different variables that are changing on top of that. I don’t want to call it an unknown, but there’s a lot of things that we’re gonna have to figure out when we get there and you guys know how the rules are today, you don’t really have the opportunity to change much, so we’re trying to anticipate some of the things coming our way.”
ARE YOU EXCITED ABOUT GOING BACK TO NEW HAMPSHIRE IN A FEW WEEKS? “Yeah, I feel really good about the second round, we just have to get through the first round here. I feel great about Gateway coming up this weekend. I feel like that should be a good race for us. It’s important for us to be able to have a solid run up there, score stage points in both stages, run up towards the front and win if we can, but if not, we’ve got to score a lot of points because, to your point, Bristol has been a tough one, so it’s important for us to run good this weekend and I’m looking forward to Loudon for sure.”
HOW ARE YOU WITH DO-OR-DIE SITUATIONS IN THE PLAYOFFS? “You’re never out of these things. You look back at Darlington and, yes, was it frustrating? Sure. It’s over. You’ve got to move on. We’ve got to try to learn from it as quickly as possible, but we’ve got to move forward because the playoffs will continue with or without you, so you better make sure you’re on the boat before it takes off. You just have to write that one off as quick as possible, move on, figure out what you have to do at Gateway and keep going because at some point in the playoffs your back will be up against the wall and it will be do-or-die at some point – 100 percent in the playoffs in these 10 weeks you will have that at least one time. If you make it to the Championship 4, your back is up against the wall. You must win. That can happen in any other round too, so you want to try to keep yourself from being in that position and that’s why Gateway this weekend is an ultra important weekend. The good news is, more times than not, we excel in those types of situations. We usually can rise to the occasion. With that said, we’ve seen the other side before too. We’ve been through it enough, but we know how to handle it.”
DO YOU READ SOCIAL MEDIA DURING THE PLAYOFFS? “To be honest with you, I can’t say I’m on social media that often. Three kids at home. I’ve got a very busy life. I’ve got a lot of different jobs going on. I don’t really mess with it much and there’s a lot of opinions that are uneducated on there a lot of times – not all the time, but a lot of times. I know what I have to focus on because I’m in it, I’m doing it every day, so I make sure I focus on that. I’ve found over the years that social media is a complete waste of time and so I try to not be on it.”
THERE’S BEEN SOME TALK ABOUT SHOULD THE RULES CHANGE FOR THE FASTEST LAP? SHOULD YOU HAVE TO BE ON THE LEAD LAP TO WIN THAT? “I can’t say I’ve thought much about that, but yeah. I would say if you’re gonna go behind the wall or you’re gonna have damage repair, there’s the opportunity of making your car better than stock, better than what you originally went through tech with. It probably opens the door for shenanigans. I mean, more power to them if they take the time to do that. I mean, you had nothing else to lose and only something to gain, so you go for it. I get that. I guess maybe to your point maybe you’d have to be on the lead lap at the moment you run the lap, or maybe within one lap of the leader. That’s probably a good idea. That’s just off the top of my head without really thinking about it. It’s your idea, really, but it probably should be something like that because even if it’s Daytona or something like that, I mean, who’s to know that you get in a wreck and you knock the spoiler down a little bit, you know what I mean, when you backed it in or something. That makes the car faster and doesn’t seem quite fair, so I guess there’s probably something they could do there.”
WILL POWER WAS ONE OF THE FEW PEOPLE AT PENSKE WHEN YOU ARRIVED AND WAS STILL THERE UNTIL THIS WEEK. HOW MUCH INTERACTION DID YOU HAVE WITH HIM AND ARE THERE ANY FEELINGS ABOUT HIM LEAVING? “In a way, it’s nice to be the senior driver of the whole place at this point, but I love Will. He’s a great person. He’s a great human. He did some incredible things over his time at Team Penske. The Indy 500 and championships. I always remember the moment where we both won the championship in the same year and we had a victory party for all of Team Penske. He was up there playing the drums. We were singing We Are The Champions together on stage. That was really one of the coolest memories for me, so he’s been a lot of fun. I’ve learned a lot from him. I know he’s gonna end up in a good place, I’m sure, but he’s been a great asset to Team Penske for many, many years and obviously our best wishes are for him and his family moving forward.”
GATEWAY HAS BEEN A GREAT TRACK FOR YOU AND TEAM PENSKE. WHAT MAKES THAT SUCH A GOOD TRACK FOR YOU GUYS? “It just seems like for us right now most of the time our cars are pretty fast at the flat one-mile type racetracks, whether that’s Phoenix, Gateway, Loudon, Richmond kind of falls in there, but it’s quite a bit of a different track as well, but it’s similar speed-wise. It seems like we have a pretty good handle on that type of thing and that type of track, so hopefully that’s the case again. Like I said, a lot of things happen in a year, whether it’s manufacturers or teams. The 20 was really strong there at Gateway last year, so I would expect him to be fast again, and some others. It’s been a good one, but with that said, there are a lot of things that can happen at that racetrack. It doesn’t seem like we’ve had a lot of fall off there in the past. I don’t know what this tire will bring – possibly more – but with the lack of tire fall off that’s been there in the past, the strategy, if you get a caution that falls in the middle of a stage, it really jumbles it up like it did last year and it can happen again.”
DO YOU EXPECT THE TRACK TO BE DIFFERENT BECAUSE IT’S AT A DIFFERENT TIME OF THE YEAR, WHETHER IT BE TEMPERATURE OR BEING IN THE PLAYOFFS? “I think it’s probably the tire that’s gonna be the bigger difference than the other two.”
