Joey Logano: 22 car is fast, but needs to be championship-caliber fast
Joey Logano ended a year-plus drought Sunday by winning at Talladega Superspeedway, putting his name in the playoff bucket and righting the Team Penske No. 22 ship.
Now, Logano said Friday, it’s time for the next chapter. He’s looking to challenge for victory No. 2 in Sunday’s AAA 400 at Dover International Speedway (Fox, 2 p.m. ET).
“If we keep just doing our thing, eventually we are going to feel like we are a championship-winning team,” he said. “We just have to get a little faster. That is the biggest thing. How can we be the car that is leading consistently? We have been that car the last two weeks but how can we do that the rest of the way? If we can do that we will be in championship contention.
“We have time, which is good. [But] I don’t look at it like we have time because I want to win each week, and the playoff points mean so much. We need to be considered one of those top three cars that I brought up earlier to feel like we are a strong threat of winning the championship.”
Logano won at Richmond Raceway last spring, but that win was ruled encumbered by NASCAR because of violations, and Logano’s automatic entry into the playoffs disappeared. He didn’t win the rest of the season and was on the outside looking in as 16 drivers pursued the Cup championship.
Over the succeeding months, Logano said the team battled back, looking for more speed.
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“I just kept looking at what we could do to get better,” Logano said. “We were in a slump, for sure. We came out of that Richmond race, and we had our penalty and then we crashed the next two weeks at Talladega, here (Dover), actually three weeks because we crashed in Kansas. We lost so many points those three weeks it was like, ‘Uh oh, what happened?’
“When you don’t have speed in your car, you tend to get caught up in more junk. You don’t score stage points. By the time we started figuring it out and getting better, the playoffs were starting and it was too late. It was definitely a challenging season and you just try to get better.”
Source:-https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nascar/2018/05/04/joey-logano-looks-more-speed-dover/581503002/
