HOMESTEAD, Fla. — Joey Logano considers himself an “early person.”
He backs that up on the racetrack.
Last Sunday (Oct. 20), Logano locked himself into the NASCAR Cup Series Championship 4 — the first driver to do so – by winning the Round of 8 opener at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. It’s something Logano has done twice before in 2018 and 2022 on his way to Cup titles.
What’s next for an encore?
He showed up to Homestead-Miami Speedway a day early for a press conference, for starters.
“This is just who I am,” Logano said Friday, the day before any Cup Series cars would see the surface of the 1.5-mile oval in south Florida.
He could have devoted the entire week to preparing for a much more important race in two weeks at Phoenix Raceway.
Well, Logano mostly did that.
The week was “pretty much what you would expect,” said the two-time Cup champion, stopping by Homestead before a Friday night appearance.
“We went over Vegas for a little bit, just like we typically would after any race,” Logano continued. “An overview of Miami, of just the details of things that we’re looking for here, and then we started talking about Phoenix and pretty much just stayed [focused] there the rest of the time.”
But the Team Penske driver wanted to make something very clear.
He definitely wants to earn his fourth win of the season and the second of his career at Homestead.
“Not that this race doesn’t matter to us,” Logano said. “I’m still here to try to win the race. I’m not going to just lay up and not just start the race and put it away. That’s not who I am, it’s not what we want to do for our sponsors or for our fans. We still want to try. [The Vegas win has] just changed a lot of our focus, that’s all.”
But thanks to a winning LVMS race strategy, the No. 22 team does have something the remaining seven playoff drivers don’t.
Two extra weeks to prepare for a championship.
“The fact we earned an advantage by being able to focus onto Phoenix before anybody else, we need to take advantage of that opportunity,” the driver explained. “That’s a big opportunity to have. So as much as we want to run well here – and I think we will – we need to have all our focus on Phoenix right now.”
Logano observed that if he were to have locked himself in the weekend before the race at Martinsville Speedway, that only leaves a “couple days before (the Phoenix car’s) gotta be on the road headed out west. So you don’t have much time to really change much of the setup or whatever things you’re wanting to do, right? You can practice, obviously, but you are just massaging the little things, you don’t have a whole lot of time there.”
Getting ready for Phoenix isn’t just limited to what happens on the track.
There is a lot on the sponsor side of it that “definitely adds up,” too.
“If you think about it even from a partner’s perspective, right now they know you’re racing for a championship, a lot of people want to show up now,” Logano explained. “Now you can book a suite, you can get the travel stuff for everybody. All those distractions that you’ll have on championship weekend, you can knock a lot of that out now, which to me, is something. …
“Because you have media on Tuesday, you have media again on Thursday. So you really only have one day at the shop, one-and-a-half days before the car is loading up and going. So you just don’t have the time. This advantage does help a little bit with those type of things, too.”
As for Sunday’s (Oct. 27) race, in which he’ll start at the rear after replacing his steering system, Logano can make himself useful to the other Team Penske driver still in the hunt for the championship — Ryan Blaney.
Well, “within reason of what we can do,” Logano noted. “If there is anything that they want to try in practice or set up wise or anything like that, we are open to it. What do you guys need to make sure you have the fastest No. 12 Ford Mustang out there? What can we do to help you from that perspective? So we’ll do what we can to be good teammates, for sure.”
Follow Daniel McFadin on X at @danielmcfadin
Daniel McFadin is a 10-year veteran of the NASCAR media corp. He wrote for NBC Sports from 2015 to October 2020. He currently works full time for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and is lead reporter and an editor for Frontstretch. He is also host of the NASCAR podcast "Dropping the Hammer with Daniel McFadin" presented by Democrat-Gazette.
You can email him at danielmcfadin@gmail.com.
I’d bet Jeff has Larson and Byron putting in time for Phoenix too. Chase and team need to concentrate completely on winning this race.