You wouldn’t have been able to tell by Joey Logano’s facial expressions, as the congenial Team Penske driver is seemingly perpetually smiling. But the sigh of relief as he spoke to reporters Friday and then his words conveyed the importance of winning last weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
The victory guaranteed Logano’s advancement to the third of four rounds in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship playoff, regardless of how he finishes Sunday at Kansas Speedway or next week at Talladega Superspeedway, the Round 2 elimination race.
A lucrative reward regardless, Logano’s free pass is especially meaningful in a segment featuring two tracks among NASCAR’s most challenging — Kansas with a penchant for inducing right-front tire failures and Talladega, where multi-car wrecks habitually occur and drivers are often a victim of circumstance.
“It makes us feel a lot better,” Logano said. “Everyone else is stressed out in this garage, except us right now. That’s something to be proud of and something that we need to take advantage of. That stress will wear a lot of teams out as we’ve seen, so right now it’s an important time for us to take these next two weeks, enjoy them, but still go out there and try to win the race.”
Logano isn’t the only Chase driver who can focus solely on winning the next two weeks. However, while Logano can relax, Matt Kenseth and Dale Earnhardt Jr. find themselves in a precarious situation where their respective playoff livelihoods are virtually dependent upon reaching Victory Lane.
“Obviously a win moves you on, but I don’t feel like it’s a must win,” Kenseth said. “It would make it easier if we could win.”
Kenseth and Earnhardt each saw formidable Charlotte runs come apart due to various maladies that culminated with Kenseth slamming into the Turn 4 wall and Earnhardt running through an oil patch and smacking the Turn 2 wall.
Because Kenseth finished 42nd and Earnhardt 28th, neither is likely to earn enough points at Kansas and Talladega to be among the top eight advancing to the third round. Therefore their best means of transferring hinges on winning.
“We ain’t got nothing to lose,” Earnhardt said. “We just got out there and run hard and try to win races and try to run up front. We are not close enough to the top eight to sort of have a strategy.”
Though the elimination, knockout Chase format is just in its second year, coming through in must-win scenarios has come to epitomize NASCAR’s playoffs. Four times in five instances a driver has won an elimination race that they needed to qualify for the next bracket or win the championship. including last round when Kevin Harvick captured the victory at Dover International Speedway.
If either is to punch their Round 3 ticket Sunday, the likelihood is it will be Kenseth, a two-time Kansas winner who excels on mile-and-a-half tracks, and not Earnhardt, whose last victory on such a sized oval came in 2005. That futility left him bewildered when asked by reporters Friday.
“I know that 10 years of not winning has got a little bit more to do than just luck,” Earnhardt said. “But, we have been running good enough.”
As evidence he can compete, Earnhardt can point to last year at Las Vegas where he was leading on the final lap before running out of fuel, or in May when he finished third at Kansas. He also owns top fives at Atlanta, Las Vegas, Texas and Charlotte this season.
“I think as a driver I’m a little bit more consistent at the short tracks and obviously, we run pretty good at the plate tracks,” said Earnhardt, who’s won at Talladega and Daytona this season. “I like the mile-and-a-half’s and I run pretty good at them. We always second, third, fourth or fifth. We are never really the guy that can lock in the win. I mean I don’t know. It’s just one of them things.”
But Earnhardt needs to be better than “good enough” if he wants to win Sunday and avoid leaving his Chase fate depended upon what happens at Talladega.
“We are just going to go out there and race and see how it works out for us and try to win,” Earnhardt said. “We have two opportunities and we are a good enough team so we will see how that works out.”
