Joey Logano is no stranger to being at the center of the action.
The two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion has made a whole career out of driving hard, pushing the limits, refusing to back down and, most importantly, winning. In turn, those qualities have seen Logano be cast as the main character of multiple NASCAR seasons — with this year serving as just the latest example. It would not be an understatement to say that Logano‘s win at Las Vegas last Sunday changed the entire complexion of the 2024 season, and that victory came in the face of long odds and even a bit of luck to get this far.
MORE: Rewind Logano’s Vegas win | Cup playoff standings
So let‘s unpack Logano‘s improbable climb to the precipice of yet another championship, and the ripple effects his Championship 4-clinching victory will have this weekend at Homestead-Miami and beyond.
Logano himself would tell you that the 2024 campaign hasn‘t been the easiest of his career. While the No. 22 car had its moments of speed early in the year, starting on pole three times in the first 16 races of the season, he was also running with an average finish of 17.9 — his worst mark since 2011 — and a near-career-low Adjusted Points+ index of just 104 (or 4% better than average, which is always set to 100) before winning his way into the playoffs at Nashville on June 30.
From there, things didn‘t exactly get a lot better. Logano had five finishes of 19th or worse (and three outside the top 30) in his final seven tune-ups heading into the playoffs. Little in the data suggested that he was poised to make a ton of noise in the postseason — or even advance more than a round or so before being eliminated.
But as has often been the case in his career, Logano saved his clutch driving for the races that mattered the most. He immediately punched his ticket out of the Round of 16 with a win at his quasi-home track of Atlanta in the opening race of the playoffs. Then he closed out the Round of 12 with a solid eighth-place run at the Charlotte Roval, in a race where he knew everyone on the track was gunning for him.
Still, that didn‘t appear to be quite enough to advance as the checkered flag waved and he was below the elimination line. But a shocking post-race inspection failure by the No. 48 team dropped Alex Bowman below Logano in the standings and gave the No. 22 new life. His odds to make the Championship 4 remained low, however — our forecast model set them at just 18 percent — because of his deficit in the playoff points, and diminished performance during the season relative to his Round of 8 rivals.
But you can never count Logano out at Las Vegas. He had already won at the track three times going into this past weekend, and he added a fourth trophy on Sunday to clinch his sixth career berth in the Championship 4.
And now, the rest of the playoff field needs to be very afraid of his championship potential.
Just like he did down the stretch of his title-winning 2022 season, Logano is coming on strong at the perfect point in the schedule. The rolling average of his Adjusted Points+ index from the past eight races, a span that encompasses the whole playoffs to date, plus his top 10 at Darlington to close the regular season, is 171. Not only is that number far better than his 123 mark from the 2024 season as a whole, but it represents the best eight-race stretch of his entire season. It‘s also verging on the rate Logano hit (186) in the final races of the 2022 campaign as he drove his way to the championship:
The forecast model still considers him an underdog to win the championship, as compared with favorites Kyle Larson, Christopher Bell and William Byron. But Logano‘s career record at Phoenix (with three wins, eight top 5s, 16 top 10s and an average finish of 13.5) can stand up next to anybody in the sport today, and that makes him a very real championship threat.
The other way in which Logano has become the main character of the 2024 season is in how his Vegas win shook up everyone else‘s odds. Here are the biggest changes in the forecast model‘s probabilities to make the Championship 4 — and to win the title — from before the South Point 400 to afterward:
By leapfrogging seven drivers who‘d been below him in the odds and taking away a guaranteed spot in the Championship 4, Logano did some big damage to most of the other title contenders. While Bell and Byron gained ground with top-four finishes of their own, and Larson remains in decent shape because of his cushion in the playoff points (and strong performance projections), everyone else took a beating in the odds last Sunday.
Some of that was due to circumstances aside from Logano‘s victory — the mid-race accident that took out Ryan Blaney, Chase Elliott and Tyler Reddick immediately put all three star drivers in must-win mode to advance. But Denny Hamlin is a prime example of how much Logano‘s surprise win threw a wrench into the playoffs. He ran fairly well at Vegas, leading laps and ultimately finishing eighth in a race where he was under a great deal of pressure to perform. And yet, Hamlin‘s odds to advance dropped by more than 20 percentage points, dragging his probability of winning his first career title down by five points as well. When Logano seemed like a longshot to advance, Hamlin was in coin-flip territory to make the Championship 4. Now, with only three slots remaining open, he trails the talented trio of Bell, Larson and Byron by 27 points, and his odds of advancing are just 25%.
In other words, for Hamlin and everyone else below the elimination line, Logano‘s win helped make their margins for error practically nonexistent going forward. That‘s why, whether he wins the championship or not, Logano will end up being one of the central figures of the 2024 season when we look back on it. He was never “supposed” to make it this far — literally so, before Bowman‘s car failed inspection at Charlotte — but here he is, creating chaos for his fellow drivers as he looks to add yet another title to his collection.
