“It’s NASCAR, man, I don’t know what to tell you. Expect the unexpected,” said Joey Logano. But Rick Hendrick deciding not to put up a fight for one of its drivers was something nobody expected. Especially since Hendrick Motorsports is the winningest team in the Cup Series garage -holding 312 race wins and 14 championships. Although Alex Bowman was not the brightest for a potential Cup title, his postseason performance was jaw-dropping. He accumulated the maximum points among his Cup rivals until the Roval.

However, disaster struck the No. 48 Chevy team when the car failed the weight requirement in NASCAR’s post-race inspection. The penalty for Bowman automatically vaulted Joey Logano into the playoffs. But the Team Penske driver was not ready to accept it yet, given earlier incidents.

Joey Logano had to blink twice

After all, spending over three hours among eliminated drivers can get one used to it. Joey Logano was driving home with his wife, talking about important matters outside NASCAR, when he got calls bearing the news. But he was not prepared to believe it yet. Rick Hendrick had faced such a situation with NASCAR before when Kyle Larson attempted the Double. After a four-hour delay at the Indy 500, Larson flew to Charlotte but could never start the Coca-Cola 600. He needed a waiver for playoff eligibility and his team fought vehemently for it. Eventually, the sanctioning body gave in to Rick Hendrick’s demands.

So Joey Logano expected the same battle to ensue for Alex Bowman. In a recent Dale Jr Download, he got candid about his immediate reaction after the Roval’s turn of events. The Team Penske driver admitted he had to blink twice to believe in the dazzling opportunity. “When I got the news, I was like, okay, cool. But seen this story before…Most things that are too good to be true are not true. So I felt like that was the way it was gonna be. So I didn’t get my hopes up too high. But obviously, you dream of what could be…this would be awesome – you hope. I mean, you wish bad on somebody, but boy yeah, sitting here as the beneficiary of this thing, like, this could be big.” 

In Charlotte, Joey Logano bowed to Tyler Reddick in a hard-fought points battle. But getting the benefits of Bowman’s elimination made him gleeful. He pinned all his hopes on using the newly reopened window of opportunity. “We put ourselves in that spot so that we’d be next in line. So when that opportunity came up and you find out the same way everybody else did that they weren’t gonna appeal it. It just seems like a pretty black-and-white thing anyway. Well, when they weren’t gonna appeal, I was like, ‘Here we go, second life! Don’t waste it.'”

Yet Joey Logano’s lucky draw was not the only thing in his bag of goodies.

Logano has put in a solid effort

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The 2024 season has not been the Team Penske star’s best. Till the Round of 8, he has accumulated only 12 top-tens and 6 top-fives – his worst performance in the Cup Series since 2012. However, Joey Logano dazzled when it mattered. During the Nashville race, he took advantage of five overtime finishes as his fuel mileage gamble miraculously worked out. During the Charlotte Roval race, he lingered around the top ten all day, finishing 8th. If Tyler Reddick had not recovered from a mid-race chaotic situation to clinch a decent 11th-place finish, Logano would have been in the playoffs anyway.

So Joey Logano emphasized that his and the No. 22 team’s efforts have been no less. “We’re a motivated race team any way you look at it. The parts that I was most proud about after the Roval was that we showed up with our backs up against the wall in a situation where we needed to really show up and we qualified well, we scored the second-most points on the day. The goal was to score a bunch of points. We missed that by one point.” He added, “The speed we also had this weekend at the Roval looked pretty solid to me, to where we are a Championship 4 caliber race team.”

Evidently, Joey Logano is amply motivated to see the climax of this glorious story. Let us wait and see if he can bring home a championship trophy a third time.