Logano hoping for a different type of race at Martinsville after Darlington disaster

Joey Logano anticipates going through a different swing of emotions Sunday at Martinsville Speedway than he did on his last NASCAR Cup Series race day.

Logano reported to the media after his qualifying effort that he has a car he believes can contend for the Cook Out 400 victory. He qualified ninth with it, after feeling good about how it felt in race trim earlier in the day.

“It feels nice after last week,” Logano laughed. “It’s nice to have a fast car.”

The Team Penske driver had the complete opposite a week ago at Darlington Raceway. Logano qualified 29th, went a lap down early in the first stage, and was then irrelevant the rest of the afternoon. And not only irrelevant, but three laps off the pace by the finish in the 33rd position.

It was a long day of doing what appeared to be nothing more than logging laps, with nothing to show for it.

“First off, you’re kind of like, ‘What’s going on?’” explained Logano, when asked what that kind of race feels like. “You’re trying to fix it and swing the bat a couple of times and make minor progress, if any. Then you start to get pissed off. That’s the normal reaction.

“By the end, you’re a little depressed. Then you’re a little embarrassed at the end of all that, even. So, you get all the negative emotions. It’s part of competing. If you want the glory of winning, sometimes you have to go through the agony of defeat.”

It sounds like going through the equivalent of the seven stages of grief.

“Yeah, you go through them all,” Logano said. “If you care about things and try hard enough, you’re going to feel all those things when it doesn’t go right.”

Logano and the No. 22 team were behind from the moment they unloaded their Ford at Darlington. He was near the bottom of the leaderboard in practice, and it never improved. Meanwhile, both of his teammates, Ryan Blaney and Austin Cindric, contended and finished inside the top five.

Being the lone wolf on the wrong side of the equation made things more confusing for Logano. The post-weekend debrief was then “as you would expect,” given how bad it was for a driver and team accustomed to contending for race wins and championships.

“We still had our routine of how we debrief, but obviously a little more in-depth, being that we were that far off last week,” Logano said. “There was a little bit more to talk about and a little more, ‘Where did we miss it? Was there a mistake? Where were things at?’

“Then you try to come up with answers and process those things.”

On the other hand, Logano acknowledged that he told crew chief Paul Wolfe that even if he was given free rein over the company, there was nothing he would change.

“We got a great team,” Logano said. “We got a great pit crew. We got a great crew chief, car chief. Everybody is good. We just had an off day. We just missed it. That happens sometimes, but that doesn’t mean total panic button yet.”

It just makes for an agonizing few days of having to do the postmortem on what happened before shifting gears to the next race. One that has started off much better so far.

“You have to relive it,” Logano said. “The easy thing to do and what you want to do is pull out of the racetrack and forget about it. Unfortunately, you can’t do that because if you do, you’ll probably have more of those days. So, you have to relive it another day or two and go through every detail and relive the misery one more time.

“But that’s a part of life. You do that and you move on.”