Logano and team 'stop the bleeding' with rebound weekend at Martinsville

Joey Logano got what he thought he would — and what he needed — Sunday at Martinsville Speedway.

Logano finished third in the Cook Out 400 as the leading Ford driver in the NASCAR Cup Series race. It was his second top-five finish of the season, tying his season best, but most importantly, it was a rebound after a disastrous outing at Darlington Raceway.

Even better, Logano felt he was going to have a top-five car after how practice and qualifying played out. Logano qualified ninth and averaged a fifth-place running position throughout the afternoon.

“It’s nice to stop the bleeding; everything feels normal again,” Logano said. “Last weekend, you start wondering if the earth is round or not. You’re kind of confused about everything.

“But it was nice to have a normal weekend. Solid on the track. Solid on pit road. Which they have been. That’s no surprise. But a solid race and ran in the top five the whole race. So, I’m proud of that.”

The season-opening Daytona 500 and Martinsville Speedway are the two bright spots for Logano through the first portion of the schedule. They are the only finishes the No. 22 team has had inside the top five and the top 10.

The slide of five weeks between Daytona and Darlington, where Logano finished 15th or worse in each of those weeks, dropped him to 16th in the standings. Darlington was the roughest outing of all as the team finished three laps off the pace with a car that, through practice, qualifying and the race, could not break through the top 30 seal.

“It’s just a tough team,” said Logano of the rebound. “It’s a bunch of, if I’m being honest, old guys that have been doing this for a long time. That seems to help a lot of times when you have a struggling weekend. You have the hard conversations, you have the heart-to-hearts that need to happen, and you move forward as a team, and this team knows how to do that.”

Logano was running sixth when the final caution came out on lap 311. The race restarted on lap 323, but then the final caution flew a lap later.

On the final restart, Logano chose the outside lane in sixth position. The only drivers he was unable to overtake were Denny Hamlin, who dominated the race, and Chase Elliott, whose team ended up making a winning pit call for track position earlier in the final stage.

“We had a top-five car and the [No.] 9 made the right call,” Logano said. “It’s a pretty risky call; it could have gone the other way for him. The caution could have come out and trapped him, but he got the caution at the right time. I don’t know what the caution was for, maybe you guys know.”

It was the lap 311 caution for debris from a brake rotor.

“Where was it? Did anyone actually see it?” Logano asked.

A piece was shown by Fox Sports to be on pit road with other parts reported on the track.

“Was there? OK. I didn’t see it,” Logano said. “I’m not saying it wasn’t out there, brake rotors are hard to see. But it definitely worked out for him and we still were OK. There were only a couple of cars doing that two-stop strategy, and it worked out for him. So, good for them. It just shows that you have to get clean air on these things.”