“Should I have hit the button and probably spouted off so much? Probably not.”
Joey Logano, a three-time and defending champion of the NASCAR Cup Series, is aware that his radio transmission at the end of the second stage at Talladega Superspeedway was over-the-top, and that the expletive-filled tirade probably “blew up into a bigger situation than it needed to”, but the Team Penske driver still thinks the conversation that it created was warranted.
On Tuesday, Joey Logano spoke to Mike Bagley and Pete Pistone on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio (Channel 90), where they discussed not only the radio blow-up from Sunday’s Jack Link’s 500, but also the comments from Major League Baseball Hall of Famer Chipper Jones that appeared on social media after the race.
“There’s a multitude of things that kind of lead up to that moment, and when you go superspeedway racing, there are different rules in place; there are OEM rules, there are team rules, and you try to put these all in place to give your cars the best chance to win,” Logano said. “Everybody knows superspeedways, you got to work together, and the rules that were set in place weren’t followed, and that ticked me off.”
“I feel like I’ve always done the right thing, and I try really hard to do that, and the rules have been put in place because of things that we’ve done wrong in the past,” he added. “So, you don’t want to make the same mistakes over and over again, and it wasn’t the first offense kind of situation, it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Logano explains that the main reason why he was so blunt on the radio when it happened isn’t because he was that angry, but rather passion. “I lit up pretty quickly because I care,” he said. “I’m into racing 100% and I expect things to go a certain way, and when they don’t, I get pissed off.”
“Austin [Cindric] and I talked about it, we’ve got to move forward, so, I explained my side, he understood, and we moved on. That’s pretty much all there is to it. There’s no point in airing out our dirty laundry and airing out what the rules are because that’s private information that doesn’t need to be out to everybody, but the facts are that what we set in place wasn’t happening, and that’s why I got frustrated.”
As far as the post-race comments made by Chipper Jones, a former third baseman for the Atlanta Braves and a Major League Baseball (MLB) Hall of Famer, Logano doesn’t believe that his opinion carries a ton of weight, at least not as far as his personal opinion is concerned.
“Has Chipper Jones ever driven a race car at Talladega? That would be my first question. I’m pretty certain he hasn’t. That’s like me saying something about baseball, I know nothing about baseball, that’s like me saying something he did in baseball was wrong, it doesn’t matter,” Logano said.
Logano had some nice things to say about Jones, who is an eight-time MLB all-star, but when it comes down to it, the 34-year-old driver knows the rules that Team Penske set forward, and knows that Jones, although a diehard race fan, wasn’t in the room when it happened.
“Chipper Jones seems like a cool dude, and he’s done a lot, and he’s a popular baseball player, but he’s not a racecar driver, and I know he wasn’t in the room with us when we set the rules on how things are supposed to go. You would think someone who has been in a professional sport and has been in a meeting like that would probably take a step back and say Man there’s probably more to the story than what there is. I’m surprised that it went that way, but maybe he’s just bored.”
“[But,] I’ll tell you, I don’t care.”
