Rewind: Joey Logano’s Eerie Prediction About The 2024 NASCAR Championship
Joey Logano won his third NASCAR Cup Series championship at Phoenix on Sunday by holding off his Team Penske teammate Ryan Blaney in the closing laps, but the result was foretold months earlier.
American Cars And Racing interviewed Logano at the Ford Performance season kick-off event in Charlotte on January 17 and one thing he said predicted how the season would play out.
With Logano and Blaney having won back-to-back titles for the team, we asked him if they had a bet on who would win the next one for the team. He said they didn’t, but that he did send Blaney a message in the NASCAR Champions Journal.
Jimmie Johnson started the tradition in 2011, based on the notes that U.S. presidents leave their successors, so that NASCAR champions could their thoughts on what their time as champion meant.
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It was a secret among drivers until 2017, when Johnson decided to make its existence public as he passed it on to Martin Truex Jr.
Only the champions know the full contents of the book, but Logano did reveal one thing he’d written for Blaney.
“I hope you enjoy your championship, ‘cause I’m not gonna let it happen again,” Logano said. “There was a lot of nice words in there, but I had to give him a hard time a little bit.”
As it turned out, with the laps counting down in Phoenix it turned into a two-car race between the two for the checkered flag and the title, but Logano and his spotter were able to hold off what looked like a faster Blaney by masterfully positioning the car to shut down his runs and passing attempts.
“Yeah, it was very intense. It went from, all right, we’re looking good to holy s–t, here he comes,” Logano said at his post-race press conference. “
“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.”
With the win, Logano joined Lee Petty, David Pearson, Tony Stewart, Cale Yarborough and Darrell Waltrip on the list of drivers with three NASCAR Championships.
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As for the playoffs format that he won his titles under, Logano said that’s just the way it is and everyone would approach the season differently if the champion was decided under the old full-season points system.
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“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.”
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