This is not going to be one of the most highly rated NASCAR Cup Series races, is it?
It’s not just that the racing product continues to be what it is at Texas Motor Speedway but nothing stirs a negative emotional reaction quite like a Joey Logano victory these days — especially in the aftermath of his statistically unorthodox championship last season.
Ross Chastain referred to Logano as ‘That Guy,’ in rooting for Michael McDowell to emerge triumphant in the Wurth 400 instead, which might have been the embodiment of the community at large.
People just don’t like Joey, at least not the hard-nosed racer and character he portrays, and the way that he has enjoyed the majority of his success in recent years … not that he cares.
“I think any time somebody says something about you, you can use it as motivation, whether it’s good or bad,” Logano said after the race. “When you have some negative comments and things like that, you have a chip on your shoulder. Well, I’ll prove you wrong.”
The negative comments are now those who call him a playoff format merchant or a Phoenix Raceway finale merchant while also overlooking that his 37 wins are now good for 23rd on the all-time list, one below Matt Kenseth and three from Mark Martin.
He is certainly an opportunistic champion, an apparent master under the rules presented to him over the past decade, reaching the final four in literally every other season since the format debuted in 2014.
This campaign certainly hasn’t started off like the previous one, as his consistency has been enough to hover near the top-10 in the regular season championship standings as opposed to the top-15, but the glaring lack of a top-5 and only one top-10 entering Sunday was easy to generate headlines over.
But again, the point of this is that Logano knows exactly how all of you feel about him, and the haters are indeed his motivators as articulated by crew chief Paul Wolfe.
“I think he likes it when you root against him because that really fires him up,” Wolfe said.
And so here we are once again, Logano and his 15th to 12th-place championship jump in a format that hasn’t been used in two decades, preparing to make a push for the final four at a track where you would be hard-pressed to bet against any Team Penske driver that advances there.
The only hope for his critics and detractors is that it’s an odd year, which would be a new way for him to piss you all off, just don’t tell him he can’t do it back-to-back years too. He likes it.
Playoff consequence
So listen, none of this really matters, because after a decade with a championship format, the NASCAR Cup Series must do something different again.
This is simply what we do once every decade now.
2004: Chase for the Championship
2014: The NASCAR Playoffs
2026: ???
And make no mistake, the vitriol over how Logano won the championship is what triggered the latest change, in the same spirit as Matt Kenseth and Jimmie Johnson breaking the two previous formats.
A group that includes the likes of Denny Hamlin, Brad Keselowski, the three manufacturer leaders, broadcast partners, journalist Kelly Crandalll Mark Martin and Dale Earnhardt Jr. are sporadically meeting to determine what that exactly is.
Again, the status quo isn’t perfect but it’s not as inconsequential as some have suggested either.
Consider the final laps and Michael McDowell, on much older left side tires, not only trying to win a Cup Series race but also define his entire season in the process. Tell McDowell in that moment, that restart with four to go, how inconsequential that was.
He certainly drove like it.
A driver in @joeylogano who will make any move necessary to win. 🏁 pic.twitter.com/HQdUyHtn35
— NASCAR (@NASCAR) May 5, 2025
Sure, winning a Cup Series race will always mean something but those restarts and what it could have meant for McDowell and Spire Motorsports created a tremendous amount of drama, and it mattered.
It mattered in the same way that it encouraged Austin Dillon to make the ethically dubious decisions he made at Richmond last summer, or the restart at Daytona between Harrison Burton and Kyle Busch, or what Chase Briscoe accomplished in the Southern 500 last year.
When one victory can be so transformative, there is a consequence that comes with that, one that goes beyond just winning a Cup Series race.
Again, this is all a moot point because there will be something different next year, but acknowledge to a degree that there is potential consequence for anyone any given week over 26 weeks and that was personified by McDowell versus the Penske duo in the closing laps on Sunday.
Read more: Stream of consciousness thoughts about NASCAR’s playoff debate
Anecdotes
Candidly, there wasn’t a lot happening in this race to analyze, right?
This is just what Texas is right now. There was some optimism last year that maybe The Great American Racetrack had turned the corner but maybe that was an aberration or perhaps the coolest temperatures in recent history emphasized the worst attributes of the current layout.
It is what it is.
So instead, just some observational notes from the race:
Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Hyak Motorsports are having a solid start to the season, currently sitting 15th and holding on to the final provisional playoff spot, 11 races into the season. Given the ownership structure changes at the former JTG Daugherty Racing and the loss of the Kroger partnership, the performance so far for this single car team is no small accomplishment.
What a missed opportunity for Josh Berry to have been in position to score five more playoff points, not to mention a career defining second Cup Series win, but instead crashing from the lead on a day where the race came down to two generally similarly prepared Team Penske Fords. A second win is where the Wood Brothers can start to target a Round of 8 appearance with a chance to race for a championship at a track where his organization dominates.
Erik Jones and John Hunter Nemechek to a lesser extent, needed those top-10s, especially with the No. 43 car earning its first top-5 and top-10 of the season. Legacy Motor Club is still trying to figure out how to make it work at Toyota and there are starting to be little glimmers of hope where you can see them figuring it out.
What a nightmare that just won’t end for Brad Keselowski, easily the worst start to his season ever, now 98 (!!!) points out of a provisional playoff spot, easily meaning he is in must-win territory to be racing for something bigger come September. The speed is clearly there for RFK Racing when considering the pace for Chris Buescher and Ryan Preece. It’s just been a wrong place, wrong time, worst case scenario practically every week, a byproduct of starting in the back, mostly because of the qualifying metric formula he is subject to. And going to the above argument, the potential of a transformational win and what that would do for Keselowski, is what should keep every fan of the 2012 champion invested and motivated the rest of the year.
