Joey Logano Likes The NASCAR Playoffs Just Like They Are: ‘Those Moments Are Priceless’

It’s déjà vu all over again for Joey Logano.

For the second year in a row, the Team Penske driver slipped into the NASCAR Playoffs Round of 8 in a memorable way. Last year, he left the track thinking he’d been eliminated, only to get a call during dinner telling him that Alex Bowman had been disqualified for a technical violation and he was in. This time around, it happened at the track, but in a nail-biting finish.

Logano and Ross Chastain were vying for the final transfer spot on the last lap with just one point between them, when Denny Hamlin passed Chastain and put Logano into the playoffs. Chastain wasn’t about to go quietly, though, and dive-bombed Hamlin in the final chicane, spinning both of them just before the finish line. Chastain threw his car into reverse and raced for the line backwards, but didn’t get there before he was passed by four cars, including Logano’s.

“It was all right in the windshield,” Logano told American Cars And Racing in an exclusive interview.

“I saw the pass that Denny made off of Turn 7 and I honestly kind of thought he drove away enough coming out of the backstretch chicane that he did not have to worry about it all. I think my reaction was the same as everyone else else’s as I was driving into it, but, yeah, it’s crazy, crazy stuff.”

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Logano wasted no time taking advantage of his good fortune in 2024 by winning the next race in Las Vegas to book his ticket to the Championship 4 in Phoenix, where he traded it in for his third title. That’s the most for any driver under the winner-take-all finale format that started in 2014.

If he doesn’t do it in Sin City again, or pick up a win at the unpredictable Talladega or rough and tumble Martinsville, he’ll have to dig himself out from a 24-point deficit to the cutline. He believes it can be done, but knows it won’t be easy.

“I think we have to finish in the top five in every stage and every race from here on out to make it on points, he said.

“it’s going to be really tight and really hard to do. It can happen. If there’s three tracks I feel like it can happen on, it’s these next three, but all it takes is one interesting strategy, one caution to just fall the wrong way, something like that, and then and then you’re in a must-win. I think it’s that close, so we’ll just kind of take it one step at a time.”

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Following Team Penske’s dominant performance on New Hampshire’s one-mile oval, where Logano’s teammate and fellow playoff driver Ryan Blaney won, a lot of drivers have been saying they’ll be unstoppable in Phoenix, but Logano’s not sure it will be a Sunday drive.

“I don’t know if that’s the case or not, but hopefully they’re right!” Logano said. “I always say your past success never guarantees your future success at all, so, yea, we had a good race there at Loudon, everybody’s working to get better, us included.”

This may be Logano’s last chance to win a championship the way he’s always done it before. NASCAR is considering changing the format next season to get rid of the single-race finale decider, or even eliminating the postseason altogether and going back to a full-season points championship, but he likes it just as it is.

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“You’re talking to a guy that loves playoff sports,” he said. “I love watching athletes with their back up against the wall in desperate positions, and ‘what are you willing to do?’ You only see that in sports at the very end of the season when you’re in the playoffs. Whether that’s making the playoffs, or the do or die moments that we’ve seen last weekend at the Roval, those moments are priceless.”

If Logano could change one thing, it would be the NASCAR points structure, with its regular season points and playoffs points and resets that can be confusing to fans, but he concedes that bigger changes may be on the way.

“My only suggestion is don’t lose those all-or-nothing moments that are on the racetrack,” he said.

“Sure everyone has a different opinion, sure, everyone’s going say ‘it’s because you won it,’ it but I honestly feel like it’s very entertaining. I like watching the Xfinity and Truck Series too. I’m not involved in that, I have no horse in the race there and I just like watching it.”