NORTH WILKESBORO, N.C. — Joey Logano arrived at North Wilkesboro Speedway on Tuesday afternoon to discuss and promote next month’s NASCAR All-Star Race, which he won for the second time last year.
An All-Star from another part of the professional sports world, though, had caught his attention just a few hours earlier.
Logano learned Tuesday morning that former Atlanta Braves power hitter Chipper Jones had weighed in on last Sunday’s Cup Series race at Talladega Superspeedway, using social media to aggressively denounce the three-time NASCAR champion’s actions during the Jack Link’s 500. Jones was critical of Logano’s team radio transmissions, where he tore into teammate and eventual race winner Austin Cindric for going against the strategy plans at the end of Stage 2, costing the team a stage victory and points. “Good teammates are hard to come by,” Jones said, among other pointed critiques.
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Logano became aware of those comments during a Tuesday morning appearance on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, looking them up after host Pete Pistone had filled him in. Later that day, from North Wilkesboro, Logano said, “I have no clue” what prompted the backlash, saying he’d never met the former big-leaguer, who attended the 2018 Daytona 500 as an honorary race official and was born in DeLand, Florida — about a half-hour’s drive from Daytona International Speedway.
“I found out he really doesn’t like me,” Logano said from the track’s Turn 4 hospitality area. “So I’m surprised that a professional athlete would act in that manner, because he’s been through it, right? Like, I say it all the time. I am very careful to form an opinion on an athlete by their emotions or the way they play the game, because I know from being in that position, when there’s that much on the line in a competitive environment, you act a certain way, because you’re out there to win, right? And then you’ve got to be able to shut that off. I would have assumed him being the athlete that he is and was that he would understand that and not mouth off on social media like somebody that’s never played the sport before or a sport.
“It’s surprising to me. All I can think is he’s just trying to be relevant still or something like that. I don’t really know exactly why. Like I said, I’ve never met him. I don’t have a reason to dislike him outside of now, but oh well. Guess I’m not rooting for the Braves anytime soon. I don’t know what to tell you.”
The disagreement among the Team Penske teammates stemmed from their tactics in the last lap of Stage 2 at Talladega. Cindric’s No. 2 Ford led the outside line with Wood Brothers Racing’s Josh Berry pushing him in the affiliated No. 21 Mustang. When Logano shifted his No. 22 Ford up a lane, in an effort to stall the momentum of race leader Bubba Wallace and form an all-Ford line to charge to the green-checkered flag, Cindric moved a lane higher. His decision not to push Logano disrupted their formation, and Wallace’s No. 23 Toyota cruised to the stage victory.
Logano told SiriusXM that, in retrospect, he probably shouldn’t have keyed his microphone to air out fiery remarks that became public knowledge in an instant. But the 34-year-old veteran said his view of the Stage 2 moves hadn’t wavered, even after talking it through with his teammate.
“My perspective is the same, hasn’t changed a bit,” Logano said. “I don’t think TV captured exactly what upset me, and I’m not here to air dirty laundry either or to talk about what our internal rules of going at it on superspeedways are. At this point, you know, there’s sometimes a straw that breaks the camel’s back. May have been at that moment. We’re out there in the heat of battle, and when something that was set to be a certain way doesn’t go the way that we all agreed to, and maybe not the first time, then yeah, you’re going to get a little frustrated about it.
“At this point, we talked, we communicated. We’re still teammates, right? You’re brothers, right? You’re going to sometimes not see eye to eye. Everyone wants to stick up for their side, obviously, but we just have to come to some kind of common ground and move forward, because no matter what, he’s still my brother, right? He’s still my teammate out there. We’ve still got to figure it out, and we will, and we did, right? We went through it all, we talked about it, and, yeah, you move on. So there’s a lot of lessons learned, and we move on.”
Logano drove on to take the checkered flag in fifth place behind Cindric, but his hardships mounted in the hours after Sunday’s event. The No. 22 Ford was disqualified after post-race inspection, where competition officials said they found an infraction in the rear-spoiler braces, which were not securely fastened. Team Penske officials did not appeal the penalty, saying that one of the 18 bolts on the spoiler’s surface had unintentionally come loose where it connects to the base.
The result would have been Logano’s first top-five finish of the season. Instead, what would have been a productive 41-point Talladega tally was relegated to a one-point day in last place in the 39-car field.
Logano was reminded that a playoff-clinching victory in the coming weeks could go a long way toward softening the damage done by Sunday’s disqualification. He said, though, that the penalty still stings on multiple levels.
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“There’s a lot of bad things that come along with the penalty,” Logano said. “And, you know, Team Penske, we’re not the people that, like, blatantly are going to go out there and cheat. It’s not who we are. It was a mistake that essentially, the nut came off the bolt back there on the brace, and the bowl was still in there, but it does — and I said on the radio show this morning — it does cause a little deflection, I’m sure, in the spoiler. Does it give you a competitive advantage? I’m sure it does a little bit. Did it change where we finished in the race? No, because everyone was locked down two-wide, so it doesn’t make a difference, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s not by the rules, so you’ve got to accept the penalty. And the penalty, I mean, it hurts. There’s no doubt.”
Among the implications: Logano was up one position to eighth place in the Cup Series standings based on his initial finishing spot. After the DQ and the 40-point swing, he dipped two places to 11th.
“Not to mention the financial impact as well, from finishing fifth to last,” he said. “So there’s a pretty big impact there, and then the image of it’s not good, either, so you’ve got to navigate that, too. So it’s not ideal, by no means. But, you know, I kind of had the analogy earlier on the show is that it’s the same thing as if you were to wreck someone and you say you’re sorry, it’s like it makes it a little bit better, but it doesn’t change the result, right? Same thing here. We made a mistake, the nut came off, we’re sorry, we didn’t mean to, but it doesn’t change the result. We still have to own up to what happened there, so all we can do now is just understand the process of how it happened and create a new process to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and then we just move forward. That’s all we can do.”
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