Joey Logano entered the Martinsville Speedway race weekend looking to avenge a poor finish after a high-profile run-in with Matt Kenseth in the Sprint Cup race there last fall.
Instead, he once again found that winning the pole doesn’t guarantee anything in the Sprint Cup Series.
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Logano was in the news all week by virtue of a wreck with Kenseth at the short track last fall. The two had tangled at Kansas Speedway late in the 2015 season, with contact between them causing Kenseth to spin while leading and essentially ending his run in the Chase for the Sprint Cup. At Martinsville later in the Chase, it was Logano leading when contact from Kenseth ended his day — and his Chase hopes as well.
Things were certainly looking better for Logano heading into this race weekend. A winner of six Cup races in 2015, he was looking for a stellar result in Sunday's STP 500. He qualified on the pole a year ago, finishing third. But that’s all he now has to show for winning three consecutive poles.
Last fall he settled for 37th and then on Sunday he fell to 11th.
In Sunday’s race, he led 21 laps, but as the race wore on he became less of a challenger. He even had to get the free pass to get back onto the lead lap at one point. He suffered not only with his car, but from a pit-road penalty as well. He also suffered damage to the front of his car, and then had a piece of his hood come loose late in the race.
After the race, Logano admitted it wasn’t the most fun afternoon in his Penske Racing entry.
“It was frustrating,” he said Sunday after the race. “You want to go out there and win for sure and we just missed it. The first run was just absolutely awful to go down a lap from the lead, so we fought to get our car better, which we did, and then we overadjusted and came back and overadjusted on the way back, and then we had a pit-road penalty.
“I think we know where we missed it, but we didn’t have the tools to fix what we needed to fix. Once the race starts a lot of times your hands are tied because you only have a certain amount of adjustments on your car or even on pit stops that we could fix what our problem was.”
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Logano seemed a bit baffled by the setbacks. Asked after the race what he could take out of it, he clearly was intent on trying to learn and avoid similar setbacks in the future.
“We’ve just got to go back and learn from our mistakes and learn from what happened today,” he said. “It seems like this tire kind of threw us for a loop today, or at least for our car.”
Although finishing 11th is certainly far from a dismal showing, Logano and his team are used to being a factor week to week.
He seemed intent on making sure that is the case in the races going forward as well.
“We come here expecting to run up front and challenge to win and we just weren’t there, so we’ve just got work to do,” he said.