Joey Logano suggests race manipulation was still taking place at Phoenix despite Martinsville penalties

Joey Logano shared his thoughts on race manipulation after winning the NASCAR Cup Series championship at Pheonix on Sunday. On Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour, Logano suggested to Harvick that race manipulation was still happening at Sunday’s race despite what happened at Martinsville one week prior.

“NASCAR did the right thing by doing something,” Logano said about NASCAR penalizing drivers for race manipulation at Martinsville. “They had to. If you let that go, it will continue to grow. It will be the next thing and the next thing. Going into Phoenix the next weekend after something like that like geez, it’s going to be everybody saying the hell with their race and they’re going to be blocking everybody. NASCAR is put in a spot where they had to do something. It’s tricky for NASCAR I believe because how do you prove it?”

What made Logano suggest that drivers won’t stop race manipulation is what happened during practice before the Phoenix race. “We unload for practice, the 1 (Ross Chastain) is racing the dog crap out of the 12 (Ryan Blaney) in practice. The 77 (Carson Hocevar) unloads, backs up to me, had a straightaway gap ahead of me, backed up right in front of me and ran right there and just put dirty air. Killed my run in practice. We’re doing this in practice the week after you just got dinged for this. Okay, you see how the weekend’s going to go. They’re not backing off on it, they’re just not going to talk about it.”

Joey Logano talks about NASCAR’s big threat to drivers

As of this writing, race manipulation has not been found in the Phoenix race, and that could be because the final lap was a battle between Logano and his teammate Blaney. But Logano also mentioned that NASCAR issued a big threat to the drivers before the race.

“They did threaten us before the race that if anyone manipulates the race somehow, you are not racing in the Daytona 500 next year,” Logano said. “Is that a threat? Is that real? We’ll know if something happened. I didn’t see anything happen yesterday (Sunday), but this playoff system is a big piece of it and who do you answer to? That’s the question you have to ask, who do you answer to?