Joey Logano Breaks Down Duels Disparity While Aiming to Defend His Daytona 500 Pole

The Great American Race is just a few days away and the 2024 Daytona 500 pole winner has a damning observation about the race. The usual powerhouse Cup Series teams’ preparations are under full swing. Meanwhile, a long list of smaller or outer teams will also look to get a spot in the Daytona 500. However, their chances of putting up a good showing depend heavily on practice, and Joey Logano is a huge advocate of the same.

With 36 chartered drivers already locked into Sunday’s 200-lap season-opener, nine drivers will compete to get in and occupy the four open slots. While each team has equal opportunity in theory to get these slots, there are some more favored over others. Joey Logano elaborates on the disadvantage that smaller teams possess, heading into the biggest race of the season.

Joey Logano dissects the eclectic field

Since the Next-Gen car was introduced in 2022, the level of parity has increased in NASCAR Cup Series races. Evidence of this is amply available – in 2023, the Cup Series playoff field featured a record 10 teams represented. Half of the 16 drivers hailed from teams with two cars or less, a statistic that was unheard of before 2020. Then in 2024, NASCAR broke another record – there were over 15 different winners. Accordingly, the Daytona qualifying will also feature a diverse field with drivers ranging from Trackhouse Racing’s four-time Indy 500 winner Helio Castroneves to 22-year-old Chandler Smith driving for Garage 66. Yet according to Joey Logano, the powerhouse teams still have an added advantage.

In an interview with Sirius XM NASCAR, Joey Logano emphasized the importance of the Daytona 500. He said, “You’re qualifying for the Great American Race – more eyes on our sport than ever.” But then he observed the lack of experience: “And then you’re asking everyone to go out there cold turkey without even running the car – and you got a lot of drivers that just haven’t been here. A few of them don’t have a whole bunch of experience in teams… everyone needs a fair shake at it.” 

2025 marked the first time since 2022 that NASCAR held a practice session ahead of the Daytona 500. Since the pandemic in 2020, NASCAR cut down practice time for safety concerns and now that they are back, Logano is a strong advocate of it. However, he feels that for a lot of the field, one practice run isn’t enough. Veterans like Helio Castroneves have never driven a Next-Gen car before and thrusting them into the Duels at Daytona with minimal practice is not fair. Wouldn’t this just benefit the bigger, well-equipped teams of NASCAR? That’s exactly what Joey Logano thinks as he eyes a back-to-back Daytona 500 pole with Team Penske.

For years, the powerhouses have dominated – like Team Penske or Hendrick Motorsports. Going up against them would be a tall task for smaller teams, as Joey Logano continued. “There’s a lot of teams that have a bigger gain out of it…’cause the processes aren’t typical Team Penske, Hendrick, or Gibbs – they have a process for everything. Because of that, not many times there are issues – there is sometimes, but not very often. For a smaller team, it’s not like you can shake these things down anywhere else.” So as Logano strives to defend his pole position, smaller teams will stand little to no chance of stopping him, considering their lack of resources.

Logano’s claim comes from an understanding of how smaller teams function. With limited budgets to spend on fine-tuning their cars, any issue noticed in practice won’t have the time or the requisite knowledge to get fixed before the Duels begin. This is the advantage that bigger teams hold. They know how Daytona works and know how to build a car to compete in the race. Meanwhile, small teams, like Garage 66, might not have the experience or funds to fix their car in time for qualifying.

Despite what Joey Logano claims, even smaller teams have little advantages. And they may go a long way.

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Small steps to glory

There have been many stories of success in recent times in NASCAR. 23XI Racing is one such example – after Denny Hamlin and Michael Jordan joined forces in 2020, their team has come a long way. They cracked the playoffs in just the third year of 23XI’s existence with Bubba Wallace.

Spire Motorsports started as a fledgling single-car team in 2019. By 2025, it has ballooned into a three-car enterprise in the Cup Series. Its expansion also saw no bounds – Spire bought a charter from Liv Fast Motorsports for a reported $40 Million and also bought out Kyle Busch Motorsports’ 77,000-acre campus.

These tales of growth emphasize that even powerhouse teams were small once – and had amazing ways of improving themselves. Michael McDowell, current Spire driver and 2021 Daytona 500 winner, observed that small steps go a long way: “We’re able to be pretty nimble and make some decisions on the fly. We don’t have such a big assembly line and production line and 600 people. We’ve got 45 – 50 people working on the Cup team. If we want to do something differently, we just have a shop meeting on Tuesday morning at 6:30 and say here’s how we’re going to do it. It doesn’t take meetings on meetings and meetings and production and managers.” 

The Daytona 500 will thus see an eclectic mixture of teams on the Cup Series grid. With smaller teams vying for a spot amongst the elites, the lead up to the Daytona 500 promises to be as entertaining as ever.