Ford Racing Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Ford Racing Media Zoom Call
Wednesday, October 7, 2026
Joey Logano, driver of the No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Mustang Dark Horse, will be making his 500th career NASCAR Cup Series start with Team Penske this weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway. He answered questions about that milestone as well as his position in the Chase standings, where he currently sits fourth, 71 points behind leader Kyle Larson.
JOEY LOGANO, No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Mustang Dark Horse – YOU HAVE A COOL MOSAIC PAINT SCHEME THIS WEEKEND CELEBRATING YOUR 500 STARTS WITH THE TEAM AND 60 YEARS OF TEAM PENSKE. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THAT? “This has been a really special year for myself, but even more so at Team Penske and for Roger Penske. What this company has been able to accomplish for the last 60 years is second to none. It is truly incredible the motorsports accomplishments that this team has been able to do over different forms of motorsports. Whether it’s sports cars, NASCAR, Indy Car, you name it, Roger has been involved in it. It’s special for me to be a small piece of that and when you look at this car, it is really neat. The pictures have gotten smaller since the one you just showed me, which means there are more wins to be talked about, so it’s a little harder to see on this car than it was the 50th car, but it’s really neat to take a second – I’d invite everyone to take a look at it because it is pretty special, just looking at all the pictures on the car of all the special moments. It’s always kind of a pinch yourself moment when you see your car on there too. You say, ‘Oh, that’s pretty neat and you get to drive this one again.’ So, there are a lot of special moments for Team Penske, but then I also feel like it’s a throwback car in a way as well back to 2016 when we ran this thing a few times. It’s good to go back to some of those days when we were racing it in the playoffs too. It was a great car.”
WHAT WILL IT BE LIKE GETTING TO SHOW THIS SCHEME TO YOUR KIDS ON THE CAR? YOU SAID HUDSON WAS GIVING YOU A HARD TIME FOR NOT WINNING BEFORE BRISTOL. “Yeah. My kids, I think they get their smartassness from me, I think (laughing). Some things are hereditary, I guess. It just goes. It’s fun to talk about a lot of them. The majority of the wins they’ve been around for, which is kind of cool, but there was quite a few before them that they didn’t get to see or hear about. We don’t really talk about racing a whole bunch at home. A lot of times it’s just life, what’s going on there. It will be fun to talk about it a little bit, but, for the most part, it’s not something that comes up in our house a whole bunch.”
WITH THE CHARLOTTE TRACK BEING SO SENSITIVE, WHAT KIND OF RACE DO YOU THINK WE WILL SEE AND CAN ANYTHING FROM KANSAS OR VEGAS TRANSLATE? “Charlotte has been one of the best mile-and-a-halves we’ve had lately, surprisingly enough because at one point everyone didn’t like it. Now, it’s a good one again. It is a great race. I think whether it’s hot and slick, which it won’t be, or cooler or at night depending on how the weather looks, it’s gonna probably be pretty dang racy like it has been. It’s a track that is top, bottom, anywhere you want to go. There are a lot of options. It’s pretty different though than Vegas and maybe some of the setup stuff translates, but it’s also pretty different, especially because of the texture of the track and the bumps. It’s bouncing around a lot in there. It’s pretty rough, especially three and four, so those parts definitely show up a lot more than the other tracks we’ve been to here recently.”
HOW OFTEN DO YOU DO THE MATH IN YOUR HEAD? HOW OFTEN DOES THE NUMBER 71 POP INTO YOUR HEAD AND HOW DO YOU LIKE HAVING THE OVAL TO RACE ON THIS TIME IN THE FALL? “I personally would rather race on oval any moment of the day. There is no doubt what I like. At this point in my career, I know what I’m specialized in and it’s not road courses (laughing). I’m good with what we’ve got there, so I look forward to that part. The points, it’s something that we look at a lot. It’s pretty hard to say exactly what you’re gonna have to do to win this thing. Obviously, you’ve got one car that’s out there by 40 right now and it’s one car and he’s likely to be able to stay running at the pace he’s running. He can do that, but it’s also likely they have some issues. At some point, they’re gonna fight through something. It’s really hard to say, so, if he keeps doing what he’s doing, it’s gonna be really hard to catch him. He keeps running in the top five and scoring those points, it’s really hard to figure out how to catch that, but one bad race and he’s right back to where we’re in contention again and we can run him back down. Each week gets a little bit harder. That 70-point number is pretty far back. It’s something we definitely can do. We’re not talking a log off the fire in any way. We’re going all-in and I like the position we’re in for the reason of if we are racing for a championship, which we are, there’s not much to lose. We’re on the edge of saying we can do it, so we can race kind of all or nothing in a way to try to still go after this championship. We’re there. We’re in the hunt still, we’re just in the back half of the hunt.”
A LOT OF PEOPLE HAVE DRAWN A PARALLEL TO WHAT KYLE AND CLIFF ARE DOING TO WHAT JIMMIE AND CHAD DID YEARS AGO. HOW MUCH HAVE YOU STARTED TO GRASP WHAT YOU’RE UP AGAINST WITH FIVE TO GO? “Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of similarities between the two from somebody who has raced against them both. There are a lot of similarities between them. They’re a strong team, there’s no doubt. They’ve been able to tie together quite a few races here. What they did last week is a total Jimmie Johnson type thing, where you start the race and they’re not that great, make a big change and all of a sudden he’s up there contending for the win and you’re like, ‘What the heck? I thought we had them today.’ So, that’s a typical, classic Jimmie Johnson move. He’s strong. They’re tough competitors, there’s no doubt, but we can take them. We can get them. No one is super human. Everyone has weaknesses and it’s up to us to expose those.”
HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT LEAVING CHARLOTTE 70-80 POINTS OUT WITH FOUR TO GO TO FEEL LIKE YOU WOULD BE IN A GOOD SPOT? “I think we can still do it. It’s hard for me to say 80 points out is a really good spot, but I would say that we’re still in contention considering the tracks that are coming our way. You think of Phoenix and Martinsville, and Talladega can go either way. There are moments where we’ve done spectacular there and you can get caught up in a wreck just as quickly. When I look at those three tracks in particular, those can really change some things around. We know exactly what a win is worth. We know if you score stage points in the top two or three in each stage and win a race, you cut into that deficit quite a bit. You can gain 30 points on the whole field. Even if the guy finishes second, you still are gonna gain 25 or so points at least. If you can string a couple of those together, yeah, you’re right there. I think in our case we have to win one of them at least to be able to say we’re gonna go up there and beat them. We’re gonna have to win one if not two, and if we don’t win two, then we’re gonna have to – not that you hope for bad things to happen to people, but you’ve got to hope for some misfortune a little bit from the competitors.”
HAVE YOU NOTICED ANY DIFFERENCE IN STRATEGY SINCE THE NEW RULE OF IF THE CAUTION COMES OUT WITH 10 LAPS OR LESS TO END THE STAGE? “It hasn’t come into play a whole bunch, yet. It has I think maybe once is all I’ve seen. It changes a lot after the stage. If the caution comes out eight laps before it was supposed to, the stage ends that much sooner, then that changes what the next run looks like quite a bit, especially these days too with the amount of tire wear that we’re seeing on these mile-and-a-halves with this tire. You definitely can stretch some of those moments out to where it could add another possible pit stop, a lot of things, you may split it in different ways, so there are lots of different opportunities that they could put into play at times, so it’s a little bit more fluid. It is a conversation that we have every week and I’m sure because we talked about it today, we’re gonna have one this weekend. We’ll just kind of wait and see, I guess.”
THERE IS WEATHER POTENTIALLY THIS WEEKEND AND THEN YOU TAKE ANOTHER 10 LAPS, IT COULD AFFECT THINGS DEPENDING ON THE SERIES. HOW MUCH TIME HAVE YOU BEEN SPENDING ON THAT? “On that itself? To me, it’s a smaller piece of it and strategy is something I’m involved in, but it’s not my number one priority in the race team here. It is part of the conversations, but I don’t know if I’ve dove as deep into this as maybe you were expecting me to say I did. But it could definitely come into play and it could be interesting this weekend if there are scattered storms or something like that or cautions coming out at certain points, sure.”
HOW DO YOU SEEN AUSTIN CINDRIC BLOSSOMING DURING THIS CHASE? “Well, I don’t want to tell you how I just saw Austin Cindric because he just walked by my office and he was making gestures to me in a playful way and a funny way (laughing). I will say that Austin has matured a lot on the track. I don’t know about so much off the track, but on the track quite a bit (joking and laughing). He’s a student of the sport, maybe unlike any I’ve ever seen before. He’s very much in tune with what’s going on out on the racetrack. He studies the game a lot. I said years ago that he was the most improved player in the sport from where he started in this sport. You think about, I remember the first few truck races he ran I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t think this kid is gonna go too far.’ And then it just goes to show the effort that he’s put into it and how much he’s learned over the course of the years and, now, he’s strung together a couple of top fives in the Chase. That’s hard to do, so he’s a true contender at this point.”
KASEY KAHNE IS GOING TO BE BACK FULL-TIME IN THE TRUCK SERIES NEXT YEAR. DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THAT AND WHAT IS YOUR REACTION? “Well, you’re getting it as raw as you can get it here because I had no idea. I didn’t even know that was really a thing. That shows how tuned in I am to that type of stuff. I had no idea, but cool. I think everyone is gonna think that’s pretty neat. I’m looking forward to watching it.”
HOW ARE YOU PLAYING OFF OF AUSTIN AS FAR AS SHARING INFORMATION ON THE COMPETITIVE SIDE? “It’s a good thing. You want your teammates to be pushing you. You want your teammates to be competitive. It’s not healthy for the whole team if there’s only one car that runs good because even if you are the one car that runs good, sure, from a selfish standpoint you’re probably beating your chest, but it doesn’t last for long. Eventually, the one car that might still be ahead them but your running 20th and is that really that great? Nope. We want to win, so I think it’s important to have teammates that push you to become better, push the teams to become better, but also that you can learn from – not just from a pushing standpoint, but also like, what are they doing better than you? And being able to have that open conversation, that dialogue back and forth is ultra important. Something that I think you have to be selfless to understand how important that is inside a race team. To your point, when I was young I did not think that way. When I was young I wanted to be number one. I didn’t care about anything else. Now, it’s like, ‘Yes, I still want to be number one, but I also know how important it is to have the others right there with us and pushing each other.’ Yeah, we’re gonna have to race each other sometimes, but we also need to be an open book to make sure that we’re all up on it and giving Roger, Ford, everyone that works here, our partners, the best chance to win. That’s the only way to do it.”
HIM RUNNING WELL HELPS YOU. IS HE WILLING TO SHARE? “Yeah. We look at everything he does. We talk to him. We ask him what’s going on. We try things. We try and understand what it is and it’s not always the clearest. Even when you’re teammates it’s not always the clearest of, ‘This is what it is. That’s what it is’ because there’s still the human element. We’re not robots inside the race car. We’re still humans and we have different things that we like and that are different, so just trying to maybe pick and choose one or two things. It’s like, ‘Oh, this makes sense or that makes sense, so let’s try that.’ You just try and pick it apart.”
