JOEY LOGANO, No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Mustang – WHAT WAS THIS TEAM MISSING THIS YEAR? “Speed. Just a lot of things. We’re not out yet. As much as it feels like I’m out at the moment there’s still a long ways to go in this race and things can happen to the competitors that are out there. You don’t want to wish misfortune on people for your own good, but it’s kind of our only hope at the moment. It’s what happens. You don’t go fast enough, you’re in the back and they wreck in front of you at Bristol on a restart and you’re going so fast that you can’t whoa up or turn or do anything and you get kind of pile drove into the wreck. It’s our own fault.”
HAS IT FELT LIKE AN UPHILL BATTLE ALL YEAR? “Yeah. I haven’t really felt like we’ve made any big gains that we need to and unfortunately it seems like it’s at every track. Typically you may say, ‘Oh, we’re off on a mile-and-a-half, but our short tracks are OK or your road courses are OK.’ It just seems like we’re off everywhere right now, so we’ll see what happens here the rest of the race and if we get knocked out it gives us a few races to swing big and try to figure it out for next year. That’s about where we’re at, so we’ll wait anxiously. I keep watching the TV behind you. I’m pretty distracted at the moment, but it is what it is. We just move forward from here.”
HOW FRUSTRATING IS THIS? “Obviously, it’s a real bummer. You get out of the race like that and you’re behind the wall and you’re in denial for a minute. You don’t want to believe that it happened and you want to think that it’s fixable, but the car was tore up too bad.”
HOW UNCHARACTERISTIC IS IT FOR YOU TO HAVE TO LEARN HOW TO RACE FOR 15TH? “It takes something different out of a driver to drive a car in 15th and tonight we weren’t even that. It’s a little uncharacteristic for us right now and we just have to go to work and keep our heads down and stay faithful in each other, keep trusting each other that we can figure it out. It’s still the same team that won the championship last year. We’re a little lost at the moment, but we’ll keep fighting and try to figure some things out.”
HOW DISAPPOINTING HAVE THESE FIRST 29 RACES BEEN FOR YOUR TEAM? “Like I said, I’m not saying it’s over yet, but at the moment obviously not as good as we needed to be – inconsistent, not fast enough, not scoring stage points. When you don’t score stage points that just says you’re not fast enough. We’ve been able to manufacture finishes like we did last year. Paul does a great job of giving me a chance to finish good. If this was a few years ago and there wasn’t stage racing, we’d be sitting in a lot better shape because we would figure out a way to close races, but we don’t score the points during the race because we’re just not fast enough.”
HOW MUCH DID YOU COME INTO THIS RACE THINKING YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFUL BUT BE AGGRESSIVE? “I knew my situation and what I needed to do, but it’s Bristol and there’s not really many things you do differently depending on your scenario. There’s nothing I could have done there in that wreck. It’s just a product of being back there and the way we raced or anything like that didn’t affect that. The only thing that affected that is we were back there, so that’s it.”
DID YOU JUST GET HIT FROM BEHIND AS EVERYBODY SLOWED UP? “Yeah, I saw the smoke. I saw the 7 spinning. Coleman was saying, ‘He’s coming up. He’s coming up.’ As I was on the brakes to try to pull onto the bottom. I think it was Newman behind me, but I think someone hit him behind him and it was just kind of a chain reaction into it. Once I got hit I was like, ‘Shoot, I’ve got to go up now’ because I couldn’t make the bottom, so I committed to that and the hole closed up.”
Ford Performance PR
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