A NASCAR cockpit can reach 140 degrees on race day. Drivers sit in that for hours. To deal with it, they wear a cool shirt, a fire-resistant undershirt with thin tubes that pump chilled fluid across their chest and back. The whole grid uses one. The catch is that it breaks a lot.
On a recent episode of Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour, Joey Logano explained why drivers rely on these cooling systems despite their frequent failures.
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“Boy, when it works, it’s like jumping in the pool. It is beautiful.”
The logic behind it is not complicated. Heat slows a driver down the same way it slows an engine down. Focus is loopy, and reactions get sloppy. A cool shirt buys back those margins.
“It’s just like an engine — it doesn’t want to run so hot, and you start losing performance,” Joey Logano said. “These cars are twitchy. You’ve got to be quicker with the wheel, and you’ve got to be quicker with everything.”
The technology is older than most people think. Paul Goldsmith was experimenting with driver cooling back in the 1960s. For decades after, the solution was stuffing ice bags down a fire suit at pit stops. The modern version, thin tubes, chilled fluid, electric pump, was introduced to the racing industry in the 1990s. Jimmie Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus optimized its usage in 2018.
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Knaus reportedly tested it by locking a crew member inside a 100-degree paint booth. Word got out. Everyone wanted in. Then the Next Gen car came in 2022 and trapped even more heat inside the cockpit. At that point, it stopped being optional.
Here is where it gets ugly. If the pump dies mid-race, the fluid stops moving. Instead of pulling heat away from the body, it just sits there and absorbs it. Within minutes, the driver is wearing near-boiling water against their skin.
“When it breaks, and all the fluid sits on you — it’s 140 degrees, so your body temperature just warms the stuff up,” Logano said. “It feels like you’re sitting in a hot tub. Which is not ideal when you’re already in a sauna.”
This is not a rare edge case. At Pocono in 2025, Ryan Blaney’s suit failed on Lap 15. He drove the next 145 laps in over 120-degree heat, finished third, and then collapsed three times getting out of the car.
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Joey Logano has had his own version of that day. His cool shirt quit, his helmet blower stopped working, and his drink system failed, all in the same race. The straw was four inches too short because of how the hose was routed over the shifter. To get a drink, he had to put his head in his lap while racing at full speed. Teams have since figured out how to drain the fluid fast if things go wrong, but the underlying risk has not gone away. It does not matter to Logano.
“If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but you’re going to go for it,” he said.
A different kind of heat for Joey Logano
Away from the cool shirt conversation, Logano is sitting in a much less comfortable spot. He is 20th in points with eight races left before the cutoff.
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That is a problem because NASCAR brought back the old Chase format for 2026: the top 16 in points after 26 races make the playoffs, full stop. A race win no longer punches your ticket. Points are all that matter.
Joey Logano has no wins. Two top-fives. An average finish of 20.78. He is 10 points outside the cutline with a 24th-place finish at Sonoma still fresh in the numbers. Meanwhile, his teammate Ryan Blaney is third in the standings from the same building. Toyota has won 11 of the first 18 races this season. Ford is down, waiting on a new body coming in 2027. None of that helps Logano right now. Eight races. Ten points. No margin for error.
For a three-time Cup Series champion, missing the playoffs entirely would be the story of his 2026 season, and right now, that story is very much still being written.
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