Irwin Tools Night Race (Bristol Motor Speedway)
Friday, August 23, 2013Joey Logano, driver of the No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion, is coming off his first NASCAR Sprint Cup Series win for car owner Roger Penske and Ford Racing. The win at Michigan last week marked the first Penske Racing win with Ford since Ryan Newman won the New Hampshire 300 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway on Sept. 15, 2002. Logano visited the infield media center at Bristol Motor Speedway to talk about the momentum his team has gained and what it will take to secure a spot in this year’s Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.
JOEY LOGANO – No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion – CAN YOU TALK ABOUT YOUR WIN LAST WEEK AND HOW YOU HOPE IT PROPELS YOU THROUGH THE REST OF THE SEASON? “The win was huge. Obviously, it couldn’t come at a better time and at a better race track to keep our Chase hopes going. I felt like our two best shots were last weekend and this weekend. We capitalized 100 percent last week with the pole and leading the most laps and winning the race, and I feel like we’ve got another really good shot at it this weekend and do the same after seeing the way we ran here in the spring. We’ve got a notebook to go off of now that we’ve come here for the second time, so I’m looking forward to practicing here in a few minutes.”
WHAT IS YOUR MINDSET ON HOW YOU WILL APPROACH THIS RACE? “I think the same thing we’ve been doing. Over the last few weeks – ever since the All-Star Race – this team has been really good and really consistent and making up a lot of points and when we have an opportunity to win we were able to capitalize on it last weekend. I think we do the same thing. We still can’t afford to have a bad race. These are three very, very important races. I think we’re 17 points out of getting in the 10 top and only a few points of getting into the last wild card spot. Our goal is to get in there by points right now, whether that’s by wins or whatever. I think if you have two wins, you’re pretty confident you’re gonna be in it, so if we can get that win it would be huge. If not, we’ll have some points we’ve got to make up but this team can do it. I’m very confident coming into this weekend, for sure.”
WHEN YOU SWITCHED TEAMS DID YOU HAVE ANY IDEA THIS SEASON WOULD GO AS IT HAS WITH ALL THE UPS-AND-DOWNS? “That’s the cool thing about racing is you never know what’s gonna happen. That’s the cool part about life – you never know. You just kind of go with the flow, at least the way I live life, is I just kind of go with it. I think this year has had a lot of ups-and-downs and about every situation you can go through in one season, so I look at it as being pretty entertaining and a lot of fun out there. I think this team has been very strong and our chemistry between Todd Gordon and myself has just been growing and we’ve been making faster and faster cars, and everyone at Penske Racing is too. Brad and myself have been working great together. I think everything is going as planned as we looked at it at the beginning of the season and thought what was gonna happen. This is what our goals were – to go out there and win races and run up front consistently. That’s where we’ve been. The only thing we haven’t been able to do is have the points to back that up like we need.”
JOEY LOGANO CONTINUED — HAS IT HELPED TO COME INTO AN ORGANIZATION WHERE YOU DON’T FEEL LIKE THERE IS A PECKING ORDER? “Anytime you come into a new company and your teammate has just won the championship, it makes it very hard to be the lead dog, basically. But Roger and Walt and all the guys at Penske Racing have done a great job of making it that way, making us equal and valuing my opinion. Obviously, if you go out there and produce after you go in there and tell them what you want and what you need in your race cars, it’s your job to go out there and produce after you get that. That’s what we were able to do and that’s what raises your value up and raises your voice up also when you’re in there talking. That win was big for a lot of reasons, believe me.”
ARE YOU GETTING MORE OF WHAT YOU WANT NOW THAT THEY’VE LISTENED? “I think they’ve listened from the get-go, so I think we’ve just been slowly but surely – as a driver your job is to diagnose what’s wrong with the car and try to come up with certain things that you need to be better. ‘I need this to be running with this car,’ and finding things that are better with other cars and telling them what section of the corner or what section of the straightaway you need to be better, and then we all as a team have to work together to figure out where that’s at and how to make it better. And that’s what we’ve been able to do. That’s how you get better throughout the season and that’s what Penske Racing has done a great job with is all of us working together as one team. The 2 car is not doing anything different than the 22 car is when we’re trying to build parts and pieces for these race cars.”
HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH THE FACT YOU LOST SO MANY POINTS AT TEXAS AND IF YOU HAD THOSE POINTS TODAY, YOU AND BRAD WOULD BOTH BE IN THE TOP 10 NOW? “We think about that a lot. Obviously, we don’t agree with what happened, but the fact of it is it is what happened. The only thing you can do about it is go out there and win races and run well and overcome it. That’s what we’ve been able to do. We’ve made it all the way up to 10th. If we didn’t have a couple of tire failures, we wouldn’t be in this position we are right now, either. We’d be in there pretty good, so, yes, it is part of our season, it is one of the things that makes it interesting like we said earlier here, but the only thing you can do about it is go out there and work hard and make it up, which I feel like we can do.”
IF YOU DON’T MAKE THE CHASE, WILL YOU LOOK BACK AT THE TIRE ISSUES OR THE PENALTY AS THE THING THAT KEPT YOU OUT? “That’s a really hard question (laughing). I think you look at all of it, really. I can go back through the season right now and find over 150 points pretty easy – a lot of them coming in the beginning part of the season when we had some fuel pressure issues. And then I could find a wreck at Kansas. I can look at a hole in the radiator at Talladega with a little rock going through it. I could obviously think of the penalty. I could think of two straight 40th-place finishes at Loudon and Daytona. You add all that up and that’s a lot, so it’s hard to pinpoint one thing. Obviously, the easiest thing we can pinpoint would be the penalty, but we’re not the only team that can say stuff like that. There are a lot of teams out there that can say what-ifs and buts. If we get in the Chase, we won’t really be saying ‘what-if’ about anything.”
JOEY LOGANO CONTINUED — WITH AS TIGHT AS IT IS BETWEEN 7TH AND 14TH CAN YOU GO RUN YOUR OWN RACE OR DO YOU PAY ATTENTION TO GUYS LIKE BIFFLE AND TRUEX MORE? “Todd and I have talked about what we need to do this weekend and we just need to do what we’ve been doing and not worry about what other people are doing. Go out there and get the best finish you possibly can, not racing other cars. Don’t focus on what the 16 car is doing, focus on what you’re doing to get the best finish you can. If you do that often enough, you’re gonna pass him in points. But if you make a four-tire change because he made a four-tire change or only do two only because of what he did, it’s not gonna work out. Do what you’ve got to do to make sure you finish the best you can and not racing one car. You’re racing 42 cars and we can’t race like that. We can’t race scared. We’re coming from behind. We’re not in it, so we can still race aggressive and still go out there and go for wins, but we’ve got to be able to get the best we can out of every day no matter what.”
NEXT YEAR IS UP IN THE AIR FOR SOME OF YOUR COMPETITORS. YOU WERE IN A SIMILAR SITUATION LAST YEAR. CAN THAT BE A DISTRACTION DOWN THE STRETCH? “Oh yeah, it’s a distraction. I can tell you that much. It really sucks to be honest with you, so it’s nice to be in the position I’m in right now with a great company and a great sponsor like Shell and Pennzoil. It is a distraction. I’ve been through it multiple years and when you’re trying to make the Chase you’ve got to have 100 percent focus into it or you’re trying to win races. That’s what you’ve got to have, but, at the same time, you can’t afford to not think about what your future is and where you’re gonna go and what’s gonna happen. You have to compromise and you’re gonna take something away. You’re gonna take some of that concentration away from the racing side of it to make sure you have a secure future for the next year. So you can’t give up what you’ve got, but you’ve got to do both somehow and it’s hard to do both. It’s hard to give everything 110 percent like you need to to win races at this level.”
THOUGHTS ABOUT ATLANTA NEXT WEEK? “Atlanta is kind of the unknown for me. I’ve never really run great there. I’ve run in the top 10, but I’ve never really had a car that’s been able to go up there in the top-five or anything like that, so, like I said, this weekend we feel like is one of our best shots to do it. Atlanta, with a new tire, having the 2 car test there is gonna be important. I think having Brad as a teammate there is important for me, knowing that he runs really well there. That’s gonna be a really good shot for him to win there, but hopefully we can lean on him a little bit and try to learn from him a little bit and see what they’re doing and what they’re changing. I will say that throughout this year it doesn’t seem like we’ve had a bad race track, really, besides Loudon, which we only ran three laps. I feel like Atlanta is gonna be question mark for us, but, like I said, we’re not gonna go in there thinking we’re gonna have a bad run. I don’t see why we can’t have a really solid day going there, and then Richmond after that. We just tested there this week and I feel like we learned some things and picked up some speed. We were in the ballpark of where we need to be there, so those are all good things. I think these next three races are gonna be good ones for us and we’ve just got to make the most of them.”
JOEY LOGANO CONTINUED — WILL YOU PAY ATTENTION TO GUYS YOU’RE FIGHTING WITH FOR A CHASE SPOT AT RICHMOND IN TWO WEEKS? “It depends how many cars are in front of you. If you’re just trying to beat one car to get in the Chase, then you’re racing that one car in all honesty. But, right now, we’re racing more than one car. Like you said, from seventh to 15th or 16th is really, really close, so you’re racing all those guys and you’ve got to race like you’re racing the whole field. But if it comes down to you’re racing only one car, you’re gonna keep paying attention to what that guys is doing and doing what you’ve got to do to beat him or if you have to stay really close to him to make sure you get in. It’s gonna be a crazy race. I don’t know. It seems like it’s gonna be really close getting into Richmond with cars trying to get in the Chase and closer than it really has been any year so far of the guys that can realistically get in. I’m glad to be part of it. I wish I was in and didn’t have to be a part of it because, believe me, it stresses you out, but somehow you have to be able to put that all in the back of your mind and just race.”
BRAD WAS A BIG PROPONENT OF YOU GOING TO PENSKE AND ROGER WOULDN’T HAVE HIRED YOU IF YOU WEREN’T TALENTED. HONESTLY, WAS THERE A LITTLE SELF-SATISFACTION AFTER WINNING LAST SUNDAY TO THE PEOPLE WHO MAY HAVE DOUBTED WHETHER OR NOT YOU BELONGED AT PENSKE OR PREFERED DRIVER X? “Of course. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t. Anytime you win it’s kind of like an in-your-face thing. You want to do that. We’re all competitors, so we’re gonna be excited when we win and I feel like I’m very privileged to be sitting in the seat that I’m in right now with a great team. Roger, I could never ask to work for someone better than that. He’s an amazing person, so it’s the best second chance I could ever have, obviously, and it will really be the best chance I’ll ever have, so I’m having a lot of fun with it. Yes, it was important for me to go out there and run well, and it is important for me to win races, especially after last year and going through all of that.”
