NASCAR Cup Champion Joey Logano: Luck Has Nothing to Do With It

For decades, NASCAR’s championship was decided on a season-long competition: Whoever earned the most points won. But NASCAR knew that, as sometimes happened, a driver would do so well that he’d be declared the champ with two races left to go, meaning NASCAR’s season would end with a whimper, not a bang.

Envious of other sports that concluded their season with playoff games, NASCAR came up with the current playoff format, where eligible drivers would be whittled down to a final four, and those four would compete in one last race for a winner-take-all championship. Except you didn’t have to win, you just had to finish better than the other three. It worked, generating excitement down to the wire. All-important TV ratings improved.

But is it really a championship? Should a season’s worth of racing really come down to how well you do in the last race? To some purists, it feels artificial.

But not to Joey Logano.

Logano’s third NASCAR Cup championship, which he won on Sunday at Phoenix at age 34, proves two things: One, that he started very early, winning his first Cup race at age 19, still the youngest winner in series history. And two, that it has given him time to perfect the gunfighter focus that serves him so well on track, but hasn’t necessarily made him a lot of friends in the paddock. His take-no-prisoners, second-isn’t-good-enough mentality is concealed behind an aw-shucks! persona for the cameras, but occasionally we get a glimpse of the true competitor.

Like yesterday, at the post-race press conference after he had beat Penske Ford teammate Ryan Blaney to the wire, adding a 2024 championship to his 2018 and 2022 titles: a reporter asked Logano about the current format. Which “the Winston Cup purists,” the reporter said, considered, well, perhaps not quite valid.

“For someone to say this isn’t real, it’s a bunch of bullsh*t in my opinion. That’s wrong. This is something that everyone knows the rules when the season starts. We figured out how to do it the best and figured out how to win.”

Logano is used to criticism, of which he’s probably had an undue amount over the last 13 years. “I’ve got thick skin. Bring it on.

“I’ve got a pretty sweet trophy right now. I’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.” Indeed, NASCAR claimed the total purse was $11,700,064. The series doesn’t say who got how much, but you can bet Logano got the lion’s share.

It’s a format that puts maximum pressure on drivers, which falls inside Logano’s wheelhouse. “I just think that we thrive under pressure. I put myself in high-pressure moments, and part of the reason why I came up here yesterday and started talking crap a little bit is that it puts more pressure on me, and it seems like that helps. It’s not comfortable, but it seems like as a driver, personally, I’m better that way. I think as a team we thrive under those situations. That’s why we have a lot of playoff wins in comparison to the regular season, percentage-wise.”

And, Logano said, you don’t win three championships based on luck. “I’ve always been Mr. Anti-luck, anti-superstitions. I always do the opposite of what people say you should do. And when people say good luck, I say, I don’t need it; there’s no such thing.”

All told, the 312-lap race on the one-mile Phoenix Raceway was entertaining, if not quite compelling. All four of the drivers finished in the top six, and Blaney, the 2023 champ, was able to catch Logano but couldn’t get past him. So Blaney was second, William Byron third, Tyler Reddick sixth, with non-playoff drivers Kyle Larson and Christopher Bell fourth and fifth. In his final race as a full-time driver, Martin Truex Jr. qualified on the pole, but faded to 17th by the checkered flag.

The feel-good story of the weekend happened not on Sunday, but Saturday, in the NASCAR Xfinity championship. Riley Herbst, who was not a playoff driver, led 167 laps and took the win, giving Stewart-Haas Racing a victory in the team’s final race.

But it was veteran Justin Allgaier, who finished runner-up in the race, who was the highest-finishing playoff driver. It wasn’t easy—he had to serve two penalties in the final stage, and he battled back onto the lead lap, and went to the front.

Allgaier, who drives for Dale Earnhardt Jr., finally took his first championship in 14 seasons of trying, silencing the critics who’ve said Allgaier comes up short when it’s time to close the deal.
“I think it’s understated what this team has really accomplished,” Allgaier said. His crew chief, Jim Pohlman, “told me two weeks ago, ‘We’re going to go win Phoenix, it’s just a matter of whether you race for a championship or not. If we’re going to raise a trophy, I’d rather it be the big one rather than the little one.’ He’s very confident in that, and to have the leader of your group that confident kind of exudes confidence through everybody.”

In Friday night’s Craftsman Truck series season finale, Wisconsin driver Ty Majeski made it a snoozer, starting from the pole and leading 132 of the 150 laps and winning his first championship, as well as the race.

“It’s been a long road here,” Majeski said. “These people behind me, everybody at Ford, really gave me another opportunity when my career looked like it could have ended, and they brought me on as an engineer in 2021 with a few races and turned into a full-time deal. We made our first Championship 4 in ’22, and now we’re sitting here as champions.”

NASCAR returns to action on February 2 with The Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium, an exhibition race at the tiny, quarter-mile track in North Carolina that NASCAR visited regularly through 1971. The series then moves on to the true season opener, the 67th annual Daytona 500, on February 16.