Joey Logano starting to 'hit the panic button' after early season struggles
To say that the season hasn’t gone to Joey Logano’s liking would be an understatement. It’s been a downright disaster so far. Just a year and a half removed from winning his second NASCAR Cup Series championship, Logano looks like a fish out of water.
For one reason or another, the new Ford Dark Horse Mustang is giving teams issues. They aren’t able to find the speed that they had a year ago. Team Penske has been getting the worst of it so far.
Statistically, this is the worst start to a season that Logano has had since his final year at Joe Gibbs Racing. Not great. Logano has the same amount of top-10s as he does finishes of P32 or worse, three a piece.
Right now, Joey Logano doesn’t feel good about his season. It’s about time to start panicking for the two-time champion.
“So when you get in a situation like this it’s, you know, you start to hit the panic button a little bit,” Logano said on his weekly SiriusXM NASCAR Radio appearance. “Whereas you’re trying a lot of new things, you’re swinging the bat at whatever you can think of. Let’s try this, well let’s try this, this isn’t working, let’s try this, and you’re just trying to find a direction because you get a little bit lost. Like, ‘Well we’ve got no speed, we’ve gotta do something different. What direction do we go?’
“It’s not a great place to be if I’m being real. It’s definitely a very challenging place to be. We can look at the big speed knobs, which is downforce and horsepower. Those are the two knobs that you can turn up that’s going to make a difference. Those aren’t easy ones to maximize, everyone is trying to get as much as they can in those departments. Then you start looking at car setup stuff, like, okay what do we do with car setup?
“When you look at what the 17 [Chris Buescher] and even the 6 [Brad Keselowski] were able to do this week,” Joey Logano continued. “As surprising it is to some, probably not as surprising to me, they seem to be really good at fast, smooth race tracks. That seems to be RFK’s wheelhouse. When you look at ride height pictures and those type of things, they’re different than us, and how they get it to work, we don’t know.
“We try it, and it’s like, it doesn’t work. There’s something they’re doing that’s allowing them to race at a different height and do really, really good at these smooth mile-and-a-half type race tracks, fast tracks. Which is encouraging because it shows the potential is there if we can just figure it out.”
Joey Logano and Team Penske as a whole are lacking speed. It’s been obvious since about week three of the season. RFK Racing is finding a little speed, so maybe there is hope yet for the Dark Horse body.