NASCAR News: Press Conference with ’24 Cup Champion Logano

We are now joined by the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series champion, Joey Logano. Joey, the 10th driver to win three or more championships in his career, outstanding season, four wins this year, second in the NASCAR Cup Series, won the All-Star Race, and now ends the season with your third championship.

I think you reflect on how hard this is to do, to do the back-to-back, the multiple championships, and Team Penske to do this, something that hadn’t been done since Hendrick in 2009 and 2010, can you just speak to how hard it is to run championships like this?

JOEY LOGANO: Yeah, I don’t know how to put it into words how hard it is. But I think anyone listening that has probably done anything in professional sports understands it probably as good as anybody. You put the best of the best at their profession doing the same thing with one common goal, and the competition is always trying to get better, and everybody is wanting to win. It just gets harder and harder to do. The field gets closer and closer every year.

It’s tough. It’s hard to find an advantage over anybody anymore.

To see that Team Penske has done that, for one, shows that Roger is a fantastic leader. You’ve got to think of the management of Cindric, Mike Nelson, Travis Geisler for sure, those guys, they’re our leaders. Those are the guys that make the decisions on everything.

You’ve got to think that it starts at the top and starts to work its way through. They’ve done a good job at hiring people. They say it all the time, it’s hard to get in and it’s hard to leave. That’s what Team Penske is.

We’re expected to win, and the culture is that, exactly, that we’re going to win and we’re going to do it in a professional way. It doesn’t have to be said anymore.

That’s our brand. That’s what we are. So to be sitting here again celebrating together — I told you a little bit earlier when we were talking just what it means. It’s so cool to see everyone celebrating together. It gets more special every time because it’s the people that you work with for a long period of time. You grind it out every day together.

And after working there for, whatever it’s been, 13 years or so now, you get a lot of relationships built up over that amount of time. So winning together means more than ever to me, which makes this championship one of the most special ones.

You have that relationship with everyone a little bit more.

THE MODERATOR: Fifth driver to win three Cup championships under the age of 35, joining Jimmie Johnson, Richard Petty, Jeff Gordon and David Pearson.

How do you go from winning one regular season race to winning three of the final 10 all at different tracks?

JOEY LOGANO: I’m going to sound like a broken record, but it’s people. I also 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.

I think that’s a big piece of it. We got the attitude that we’re never out of it, and I think that’s what’s kept us going and shows in the playoffs so much is plenty of seasons, and this season in particular, midway through it, we could have called it a rebuilding year, but that would have been the loser thing to say.

We kept grinding and figuring it out and getting a little bit better and a little bit better and got the All-Star win, which was great, and then able to lock ourselves in the playoffs, and then winning the most important races. We said it so many times that winning Vegas, the first race in the Round of Eight, that’s what it’s about. That gives you the opportunity to focus in.

We didn’t run good in the last two weeks because we didn’t focus on them. We didn’t care. We showed up here and was able to be fast off the truck, qualify well, lead a lot of laps in the first stage. And we got ourselves back a little bit there further than I wanted to, but able to have a restart at the end that got us back to the lead and able to race Blaney to the end.

For Roger Penske and everyone at Team Penske, I don’t think you can draw it up any better. To see a one-two finish like that, not only in the race but in the season, that’s pretty remarkable.

For a kid who grew up a Jeff Gordon fan to be now one championship away from tying Jeff Gordon, what does that mean, and what goes through your mind?

JOEY LOGANO: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if I really think about it much, and I kind of said that earlier. Honestly, as you start to get older, you start to care more about the other people that are in it with you. To me that’s the coolest part. It’s just the first 20, 30 minutes of when you get out of the car that is what you do this for. The moment of seeing my wife and kids come up, that’s the best. That’s literally — that’s why we do it.

Those moments you cannot replicate without winning a championship. There’s nothing like it.

You talk about the grind, there’s not many people that see every bit of it. Mondays aren’t usually fun, and you come home and you’re mad and you’re upset and sometimes that — well, all that time that falls on my wife. So being able to celebrate together, that’s what makes it special.

The team being there, they go through the same thing. We talk about their significant others, they’re home and they’re raising kids on their own a lot of times because we’re gone. You guys know it. You guys travel every week. You guys have families. It’s hard.

This is the goal that we do it. My parents are back there. The time and the effort that they took to go around the racetrack with me as a kid, that’s a huge commitment. You think about the amount of times my old man would just go around the country not really knowing what the hell we were doing. I’m not a second generation, third generation racer. We were just figuring it out together. We were having fun.

To be here now and hearing what you just said, being one championship away from legends like Jeff Gordon, but being in the same category as a Darrell Waltrip and some of these others, it’s mindboggling. Just so crazy to think about it.

When you start talking about some of these legends, I’ve got to think about Bobby Allison that we lost, one of our legends. And the Allison family has meant a lot to my racing career, Donnie, in particular, the most. We race these Allison legacy cars, and we didn’t know what we were doing. And I had a great birth certificate that let me race for a little bit until Donnie figured it out. But we had a lot of fun with him. He’s taught me a lot on how to drive race cars.

Obviously in moments like this, not only in winning but in the tragedy that it is losing Bobby on this weekend is very emotional.

What was that final 20-lap run like once Blaney got to second? Coleman told you you had about a tenth of a lap to give. Were you conserving any, and did that help negate any of that pressure? What did you feel mentally going through that final 20-lap run?

JOEY LOGANO: Yeah, I think you look at the restart, and there’s 70 to go, I believe it was somewhere around there, took off, got the lead. It was like, okay, we’re in good shape. We were better than the 24. So we were pulling away. Blaney got stuck in fourth. Like, okay, I just had to manage, this could be a really long run.

So I kind of started managing my car once I got a couple seconds out, like all right, I’m in a good spot here, just got to manage it. Then Blaney got clear, and I was like, I’d better start going, considering how fast he was. To be able to pass cars these days, you’ve got to be faster, like a lot faster to pull the moves off.

I knew once he cleared the Hendrick cars and they weren’t going to make it easy for him, either, because he was going to be lights-outs fast, so I started going. I said, I’ve got to go.

He started catching me at a pretty rapid rate, and to your point, those last 20 laps, and really with 13, 14 to go, he was there, and it was one mistake away.

My car couldn’t quite turn as good as his. It’s a really big challenge to be able to, one, put dirty air on his line, but my fastest line wasn’t where he was. He was able to make the bottom work really well on both ends, but below the yellow line in 1 and 2 and even in the bottom of 3 and 4, but that wasn’t my fastest lane.

So I was like I’ve got to go fast, but I’ve got to put the dirty on him. Coleman did a great job at whipping the horse as much as he could to get me going but also to get me the information that I needed to be able to hold him off.

Yeah, it was very intense. It went from, all right, we’re looking good to holy shit, here he comes. Ryan is a tremendous race car driver. He is so fast. He pushes me a lot, more so than any other teammate I ever had. He pushes hard.

So to be able to race him to the end, it was fun. But honestly, I knew that that was going to be our toughest competition going into the weekend. I said that to our guys. I said, Blaney is going to have the speed. We’ve got to beat him on the details. That’s where we have the advantage over them. But the speed, no, he’s got turned up pretty high.

Everything worked out well, and like I said, the details at the end, the restart and getting out there and managing, that was really the difference.

How much of that (indiscernible)?

JOEY LOGANO: 50/50. Once he started catching me, it was a lot more in the mirror. But yeah, you’re — I don’t know, I’m looking at both all the time. It’s kind of hard to say.

You heard Ford talk about the championships, three championships, five drivers under 35. There’s only 10 total. You are becoming that legend that you were mentioning a while ago. How many more championships do you have? I know you’re not hanging up your racing shoes anytime soon. How many more championships do you have, and how many more do you want?

JOEY LOGANO: All of them. I don’t know. I don’t know. I tell you guys every year when the season starts, the goal is to win the championship. As many years as I’ve got left is as many as I want to get. I don’t really know what that is yet.

But I still enjoy winning, and it’s going to keep going.

The Winston Cup purists are out in full force tonight as you might imagine. I’m curious, they say 17.4 average finish or whatever it is, he’s not a real champion. Is there anything you would say to that subset of the fan base?

JOEY LOGANO: No. No. I’ve got nothing to say to them. I’ve got a pretty sweet trophy right now. I’ll be laughing all the way to the bank. (Laughter.)

The only reason I thought you might have something to say is you came in here yesterday and you said that you wanted to come in today and step on everyone’s throat, and at the time I thought that was kind of bold because the thing in sports is always you don’t give the other team bulletin board material. Is there any part of you or Paul or RP that’s like, Joey, you shouldn’t do that, and do you feel any sort of trepidation in making a bold declaration like that?

JOEY LOGANO: I told you, I work better under pressure. I’ve got to put pressure on myself, and that’s one of the ways.

The race never — the race started weeks ago, right, and in here is part of the race. It never stops.

To your point about championships and what it is, the only reason why they don’t say this about other sports is because they didn’t change the playoff system. But the playoff system in other sports is not much different than what this is.

You can have a great regular season. It seeds you better for the playoffs. That doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to go all the way to the Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup Finals or the NBA Finals. It doesn’t matter. It might help you.

It’s the same way in NASCAR, the way we have the rules now, is that you set yourself up much better. You look at the way we came into the playoffs versus the 5, the 45, those guys that scored 15 playoff points for winning the regular season championship. That’s three wins’ worth of points in three races. That’s hard to make up that amount of points. They have the same opportunity to go out there and win and move on to the next round.

So for someone to say this isn’t real, it’s a bunch of bullshit 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. It’s what our team has been able to do for the last three years.

So I don’t like people talking that way because if the rules were the old way, we would play it out differently, wouldn’t we.

I just think that’s just a bunch of hearsay back there and people that just got to accept what the times are. Times change, right? And I don’t know if you have a lot of the moments that we have today without the playoff system that we have. Do you want to see the championship crown with three races to go? Because that’s what used to happen. That’s pretty boring. You’ve got do-or-die moments. You’ve got the pressure. You’ve got all these things going on the last 10 weeks. You have guys trying to get into the playoffs.

You have that storyline. How many storylines could we make? It’s amazing. For people to complain, it makes me mad. It makes me frustrated to hear that.

Gosh, it is awesome. I watch the Xfinity Series and Truck Series, and it’s hard for me to talk about the Cup Series because I’m in it, but I watch those as a fan, whether it’s from the booth or just on TV, like I did last night.

That’s entertaining stuff. I’m glued to my TV, especially a lot more during the playoffs than I am during the regular season. What’s wrong with that? Golly, man. I don’t know. Makes me mad, sorry. I’m not sorry. (Laughter.)

Who is Joey Logano in the regular season versus what becomes of Joey Logano in the post-season?

JOEY LOGANO: I don’t know. I don’t know. I guess it’s just closer to the goal. I become more intense, probably a little shorter fused. I don’t know.

I try to achieve the same intensity level all year long, but it just seems like when it comes down to the end, you find another gear, and it’s really hard to get to it a lot of times.

But I think that’s throughout the whole team, too. It’s not just me.

This team, we talked about it in Vegas when you won Vegas about how this team finished the regular season 15th in the standings but you were ready for the reset. You were so confident. To have the regular season you had and then to put together this post-season and it end with a third championship, is there a message in there about what type of team this is or how everyone should view this team and what you’re capable of if they weren’t already, quote/unquote, taking you seriously?

JOEY LOGANO: You look at all three championships that we have now, the recipe is pretty similar. I don’t think any of them that we came into as the favorite. The first one was the big 3 and me. They won all the races, and I was the underdog, and we won the first race in the Round of Eight and we felt like we were the favorites, and we were.

Then it happened in ’22, happened in ’24. It’s the same thing.

You found something that works. It’s so easy to say it here, Why don’t you just do that every year? It’s hard to do that. It’s not easy to win the races and things to work out the way they did.

But gosh, it’s hard for me not to look back at just the roller coaster of the Roval to the Vegas, from that quick change of events, to be sitting here three weeks later, just crazy. It’s just hard to call it, the sports are.

I’m just super blessed to be up here tonight, to have the team that I’ve got, to get through and fight and have the endurance for the whole year to be able to do that together.

Yeah, I couldn’t ask to be with a better race team than the people I’ve got. Paul Wolfe, a tremendous leader, working with our engineers and Shaggy and Joe and Gronk, our car chief, and everybody that works on these things. We all do it together. That’s what makes it so special.

I know you hear that and it sounds so — like a broken record compared to other champions that sat up here and said everyone does it together. But to see the way Paul does it, how we all sit in a room and spend a lot of time together, very honestly, with each other, it hurts sometimes. They’ll point it all out.

But we were able to become a better team because of it. Doing it together and not just having Paul make the calls all by himself, we’re all in it together. That’s what makes these moments even more special, and that’s what makes Paul a great leader. I always call him Playoff Paul, and then there’s Championship 4 Paul, and they just keep leveling up. And 6:00 this morning we were all sitting in the Penske bus going over everything again. That man works. He wants it bad. So it’s fun to do it together.

On Thursday you mentioned that you usually learn something about yourself post — like at the end of the season, and say, Dang it. Looking back, now that you have the championship, is there anything you feel like you learned about yourself as a competitor that you didn’t realize earlier this year?

JOEY LOGANO: Too soon to tell. I’ll kind of go back and forth a little bit on it.

But as strong of a playoff run and winning the three races in the playoffs, that’s fantastic, but there’s obviously a lot of areas that we can be better as a team. Like we can’t just relax now and say this was great. We definitely have to find some areas where we were weak.

I can pinpoint three or four of them right now that we need to go to work on. We’ll enjoy this because championships are really hard to come by. So we need to celebrate and we need to have fun together and do all the parties and everything that comes along with it. It’s really special and it’s really fun to do all that.

But we can’t forget next year is coming, and the same weaknesses will be there if we don’t address them. Give me a little bit of time.

If a driver wins three championships in seven years, they’re going to be praised as one of the greats. It seems in your case you have to defend your record because of this format. Do you get sick of that?

JOEY LOGANO: It’s been my whole career, bud, like from the very beginning. It’s just what it is. I’ve got thick skin. Bring it on.

What is with the even-year thing? Come on.

JOEY LOGANO: I don’t know. I’m starting to believe in this stuff. 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.

I don’t know. I don’t believe it’s luck. I still don’t believe it’s luck, but it is kind of weird that it’s gone this way. I promise you I will try hard next year, too. I don’t understand it, though. Hopefully we break the streak next year. That would be cool. I’d much rather break it by making the Championship 4 on an odd year than missing it on an even year. So let’s do it again next year.

This is the third consecutive Cup championship for Team Penske, but you guys are undefeated in the Gen-7 era. I was wondering how important that is for not only your team but also for Roger Penske?

JOEY LOGANO: Obviously it’s huge. Like I said up here earlier, finishing three championships in a row is great, but finishing one-two, having two cars in the Championship 4, that’s hard. That’s hard to do to prepare a couple of cars, having two championship-capable teams.

Just as easily as we won, the 12 could have won tonight. Really both our cars were fairly equal depending on what part of the run we’re talking about. Both the teams are solid all the way through, top to bottom. It’s really like, geez, how do you do that? It’s very impressive that we’ve been able to do that.

You bring up the Next-Gen car; the car has never been more alike so the details never mattered more than they do right now. That’s a big piece to be proud of is that it’s not like we’re getting beat by money or being beat by having different parts and pieces and not being able to create a spindle quick enough. We’ve all got the same ones. It’s not a design thing. It’s all the same.

The details and the people matter the most now.

Your win tonight marked your fourth at Phoenix. That ties you second all time on the wins list here. What has this place meant to you throughout your career, and how special has it been to win two titles here at Phoenix?

JOEY LOGANO: Yeah, I think all of them have been special. I think my first win here was when we locked into the Championship 4 the first time. Then we won here, it was the last race before COVID, and we had a few weeks to, I would say, enjoy it, but it wasn’t enjoyable at all.

Then a couple championship wins. They’ve all been pretty interesting and special in their own way.

First time I’ve thought about that, but neat to click off four wins at Vegas now and here. Pretty neat to be stacking those numbers up.

Roger, when he was in here, we talked about they opened the season with the 24 Hours of Daytona win, the two sports car championships, Shell-Pennzoil won a championship today, they won the Indy 500. He just was an INDYCAR championship shy of a full season sweep, which he considers one of the best years in team history. What does that mean to you to be a part of that?

JOEY LOGANO: Yeah, I mean, you want to perform for Roger. He’s the guy that he took the chance on me. When you think about it, 13 years ago, I didn’t have options. Like this was the option.

To think that he took that chance, that Shell took that chance, Ford took that chance on a driver that won Xfinity races but that was really it. To grow into what we are now is something I take a lot of pride in. But to see the others of Team Penske and you think about what Team Penske is today, racing in all the different forms of motorsports and winning in all of them, like where else do you want to go? This is where you go to win. You surround yourself with a winner, that’s what happens.

My dad is back here, so this is one of his favorite quotes. It’s one of my favorites, too. You can’t soar like an eagle if you’re working with a bunch of turkeys. There’s a lot of eagles there. There’s a lot of really smart people, a lot of driven individuals, and that goes through so many different forms throughout Penske.

We’re talking about motorsports, but gosh, I was talking to Roger yesterday, and he was talking about his Porsche dealerships and the Ford dealership up in Dearborn now. This guy is everywhere. He was telling me all the places he was. I’m like, geez, dude. It made what we’re doing look small when he was telling me everything that was going on. I was like, this doesn’t seem like a big deal at all, does it. Obviously it is. I’m joking.

I’ve never met anybody that has more stuff going on than Roger Penske. He’s got some great people around him that go with him everywhere and do it together. It’s really neat to see how that works, and obviously I take a lot to apply to my life, as well.

In one of your earlier interviews tonight, you mentioned losing the seat at Gibbs and just your career from that point on. I was curious how big of a chip on your shoulder did that give you, and at this point is that now an advantage?

JOEY LOGANO: I’m sure it’s probably a bit of a motivator. I don’t think it’s the No. 1 motivator, but you like to prove people wrong, don’t you? You know what I mean? You’d like to shut up the critics.

I don’t have anything bad to say about JGR. I think they’re a great race team, and I understand the decision they made. We weren’t winning. Something has to change. There’s nothing against them in any way. They’re a great race team. It just didn’t work, unfortunately.

But do you take that with you when you leave a little bit? Yeah, you probably do. You’re a little bitter about it. Anyone in here ever been fired? No? Just me? (Laughter.) You were a little bitter about it, weren’t you? Then when you’re successful somewhere else, it’s like, yeah, of course. I don’t know, that’s human. It’s just human. No different than you guys when it comes to that stuff.