NASCAR Las Vegas takeaways: Joey Logano and the No. 22 team do it again

NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — Five thoughts after Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series Round 3 elimination playoff opener at Las Vegas Motor Speedway …

1. Taking Stock

One day before Joey Logano and the No. 22 team gambled their way into NASCAR’s championship race, Kyle Larson sounded the alarm.

Logano had been out of the playoffs for a few hours last Sunday night, but Alex Bowman’s disqualification suddenly put the two-time Cup Series champion back into the field. And before racing at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Larson found that worrisome.

“Joey is dangerously good,” Larson said. “You can never count him out anywhere. He’s the guy that gets the benefit of (Bowman’s DQ) and it’s like, ‘Dang, man. He’s a tough competitor.’ He’s one you have to keep your eye on.”

Sure enough, Logano wasted no time doing exactly what Larson thought possible. On Sunday, Logano stretched his fuel mileage to secure a surprising berth in the Championship 4 — although maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise given how many times Logano has done this before.

“Again, they prove they’re the best at taking an average car and maximizing their day and turning it into wins like this,” Larson said on pit road after the race. “You look at his career and he’s had a lot of wins like that. Hats off to them. That’s super impressive to gamble like that and lock yourself in.”

By now, everyone knows you can’t give Logano even a sliver of daylight in the playoffs; he’ll seize upon it and blast the door wide open. Just look at how this season has gone for the 34-year-old:

• Logano would have missed the playoffs altogether if not for a five-overtime win at Nashville Superspeedway, in which he stretched his fuel beyond what anyone thought possible.

• Logano was eliminated from the playoffs after Round 2, only to get a phone call after returning home that informed him he’d still be racing for a championship thanks to Bowman’s misfortune.

• Logano has so few top-fives, so few top-10s and such a low average finish that he was fired from Joe Gibbs Racing the last time he had season-long numbers like this.

And yet this driver, the guy who has only scored the 15th-most points this season, is the first one locked into the championship race. Go figure.

“Never doubt Joey Logano and (crew chief) Paul Wolfe when it comes to fuel-mileage races,” said Cliff Daniels, Larson’s crew chief. “They’re so good at it, and obviously they made it work today.”

Wolfe said the team had spoken about this exact scenario in their pre-race meeting, and Ty Gibbs’ spin caused a caution that put everyone right on the edge of their fuel window. Most teams figured they would need to make one more pit stop, but the crew chiefs for a handful of drivers — including Logano, Daniel Suárez and Denny Hamlin — decided to go into fuel-savings mode and see if they could make it 69 green-flag laps to the finish.

“When you’re not going to win a certain way, you’ve got options to try to win another way,” Hamlin said. “Fuel mileage is our friend. They did it.”

Adam Stevens, Christopher Bell’s crew chief, said the Logano strategy was set up by the caution falling at exactly the right time. Two laps earlier or two laps later, Stevens said, “it doesn’t pan out that way.” And that was enough to thwart Bell’s dominant performance.

“It happened right where it screwed the leaders,” Stevens said. “You can’t be upset about that. I can’t control that. And it was a legit caution. It wasn’t like it was a water bottle or something.

“Sometimes it happens that way. That’s why you run the race.”

The leaders of the race, Bell and William Byron, couldn’t afford to play the same strategy as Logano because they were using more gas while racing hard in clean air. Logano, with his exceptional ability to save gas and with Wolfe hoping the race would run green to the finish, took a roll of the dice that came up a winner.

“They didn’t really have the pace to compete, so they capitalized on that,” Byron said. “We’re up front running really hard and burning a lot of fuel, so we didn’t really have that opportunity.”

So now Logano is in the championship race for a record sixth time; he’ll be going for this third title. Will he be the favorite? Absolutely not. But he also wasn’t expected to win in 2018 or 2022, and it wouldn’t shock anyone if he did it again.

“I get down on myself every now and again,” Logano said. “(My wife) is like, ‘Just remember 2018. Remember 2022. It wasn’t the greatest years, and you’re there. Before you know it, you have a shot.’

“Same scenario again where we had maybe not the best regular season, but when the pay window opens up in the playoffs, the 22 shows up.”

2. What If?

Here are some alternate storylines we’d be talking about today had a few things unfolded differently.

• If Gibbs doesn’t spin to bring out a caution: Logano certainly does not win the race, and it’s likely Bell finishes off what would have been a dominant performance to lock himself into the Championship 4. We would have been talking about how Bell has taken the next step in his career, how he’s no longer flying under the radar (even though he doesn’t care, as he insisted multiple times on Saturday) and why his third straight appearance in the championship race will finally be his year.

• If Tyler Reddick and Chase Elliott don’t crash in Stage 2: It seemed both drivers were headed toward top-10 finishes or better on Sunday, but their incident with Martin Truex Jr. was a race-ruiner — and possibly a playoffs-ruiner as well. Elliott is now in likely must-win territory and Reddick needs a strong two races (if not a win) to advance, leaving two of the top three drivers in regular-season points on the verge of missing the Championship 4.

• If Larson doesn’t have a horrible pit stop: The No. 5 team had one of its worst pit stops ever (“the biggest mess of a pit stop I’ve ever seen,” Larson called it) and put the driver two laps down. He rallied back to finish 11th, but the lost points from what would have been a likely top-five could easily come back to haunt him if something goes wrong in the next two weeks.

3. NASquirks

The last time Bowman learned bad news about himself by scrolling through X, he was in a Taco Bell drive-thru in 2016. That day, Bowman found out he was fired from Tommy Baldwin Racing; the experience scarred him enough that he “didn’t eat at Taco Bell for years after that,” the driver said.

After the Charlotte Roval race, Bowman got more bad news from his timeline — except this time he knew something might be coming. Crew chief Blake Harris had called Bowman to tell him there was a problem in postrace inspection, so Bowman sat by the pool at his North Carolina home and kept refreshing X until the news was revealed.

Knowing his iPhone was about to blow up with texts and notifications about Bowman being eliminated from the NASCAR playoffs via disqualification for an underweight car — ending what had been a great run — the 31-year-old’s reaction was to toss the device straight into the water.

Only when he retrieved it roughly 20 minutes later did Bowman realize the phone had set off the crash detection feature when it sunk to the bottom of the pool — which automatically dials 911 to alert emergency services. Fortunately, Bowman said, the lack of cell service under the water prevented the police from showing up at his home to investigate.

“I guess you could write that I did it out of rage, but really it’s just I didn’t want to see my phone anymore,” Bowman said.

After that, his week got even worse. The next morning, he discovered one of the windows on his car was cracked due to the temperature change with fall weather. Then, Bowman learned the roof of his house was leaking and he needed to get a new one.

“Just not a great 24 hours for me, but that’s part of life,” he said. “It’s been a week, man.”

4. Championship 4cast

In this space throughout the playoffs, we’re taking a look at the current power rankings for the Championship 4 and comparing them to our pre-playoff picks (Christopher Bell, Tyler Reddick, Kyle Larson and Ryan Blaney).

1. Bell (pre-playoffs: 1; last week: 1): Insisting on keeping Bell in this slot all playoffs long was justified again on Sunday, as he had the fastest car and led an intermediate track career-high 155 laps. No, he didn’t lock himself in thanks to Logano’s strategy play, but Bell is still in the best position of anyone to win this year’s championship.

2. Larson (pre-playoffs: 3; last week: 2): Another iffy start to a round for Larson, but at least this time he salvaged a decent finish despite multiple setbacks during the race. It would still be a major upset if Larson didn’t make the title race, and he could certainly win it.

3. Byron (pre-playoffs: not ranked; last week: 3): Make that four straight top-five finishes now for Byron at a crucial time of the playoffs, and he would have had another podium result if not for the fuel strategy game. The No. 24 car started slower than its teammates on Sunday, but a two-tire call plus gradually improving the car helped Byron get in contention for the win.

4. Logano (pre-playoffs: not ranked; last week: not ranked): Even though Logano is locked in, I’d still have him finishing fourth in the championship among this group. Call me a doubter. That’s fine. He’ll probably keep proving the skeptics wrong, but Logano hasn’t been as fast as the other title contenders.

5. Best of the Rest

• Daniel Suárez (third): The No. 99 team played the same fuel strategy game as Logano, and it resulted in Suárez’s second top-five finish in the last six months — and tied his best career finish on an intermediate track.

• John Hunter Nemechek (ninth): It’s been a miserable season overall for Legacy Motor Club, but successful fuel-saving on Sunday gave Nemechek his best career finish on an intermediate track.

• Corey LaJoie (14th): Another of the drivers who conserved his gas, a rejuvenated LaJoie got another top-15 for his new team at Rick Ware Racing and has the 16th-best average finish in the last two months — better than seven playoff drivers, including Reddick, Truex and Brad Keselowski.

(Top photo of Joey Logano celebrating Sunday’s win: Sean Gardner / Getty Images)