Coronavirus the only thing slowing Logano’s season
Joey Logano is off to a fast start in the NASCAR Cup Series, scoring two wins in the first four races of the season in his No. 22 Team Penske Ford.
Always the optimist, Logano said he is trying to maintain an even keel knowing stock car racing has up and down cycles.
“It’s been a good start for sure,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “You know how things go. Sports changes so quickly, you never know what will happen next.”
Logano must have a crystal ball because he made these comments before NASCAR canceled the races at Atlanta and Homestead because of coronavirus fears.
“It’s nice to have a couple of victories under the belt, but things can happen quick and it’s a long, long season,” he said. “We are four races into the season and we have a long way to go so we need to make sure we are competitive when we get back to Phoenix.”
The 29-year-old driver scored two wins in all of 2019 but has trained himself to handle the ups and downs of the sport.
“Over years of experience you got to learn a way of dealing with it,” he said. “I’ve always been a silver-lining type of guy who tries to look at the positives at the end of the day. I think that’s what helps me get through it.
“In our sport you have a 1-in-40 chance of winning, so if you do the math, you lose way more than you win. What I do is find ways to find little victories in the race, like finding the balance in your car, or any kind of gain.”
Logano looks at both sides of the equation. Celebrate the victories; analyze ways to get better following a loss.
“It’s important to look at your weaknesses, for sure, but celebrate the parts of the race where you excelled,” he said. “You try to ride the wave as much as possible and during the lows, you try to stay positive and keep grinding.”
Logano has been the primary beneficiary of a crew chief swap engineered by team owner Roger Penske.
Penske paired Paul Wolfe, who spent several years on the box for Brad Keselowski, with Logano and the two have sound instant magic.
“It says a lot about what we’ve been able to do as a company and how well we work together,” Wolfe said after Logano won Phoenix. “We need to obviously continue to do that as we move forward.”
It has become apparent that Team Penske will contend for a Cup Series championship this season thanks to the internal moves.
“It looks like Roger Penske is a genius at this point, doesn’t it?” Logano said with a laugh. “It’s been pretty cool. I think it was a healthy change for everyone at Team Penske and now we’re seeing the results.”
Ryan Blaney, who was in position to win three races this season, and Keselowski, round out the Penske roster.
“All three cars are showing better performance, which is what you want to see,” Logano said. “You want to see your teammates right up there with you and pushing each other to be better.
“We are seeing that and we’ve opened the lines of communication a little more between teams. It was a lot to wrap my head around, but obviously, the performance has been there and it was the right change at this point.”
The future of the sport looks healthy (sans coronavirus), according to Logano. The 2018 NASCAR champion likes the changes he is seeing throughout the industry.
He credits the new and older players at NASCAR’s executive level for creating more excitement and some recent tweaks to the future schedule.
“There’s a good mix at NASCAR right now,” he said. “Ben Kennedy is the younger guy with a lot of experience around him with Mike Helton, Jim France and those types of people who have been in the sport forever.
“It’s good to have a little mix of both young and older. The job is to give the fans what they want and they want road courses. People need to look at the data, young or old, and the data says road-course racing.”