The Championship 4 race was won by Joey Logano, perhaps the least favoured title candidate up against Tyler Reddick, William Byron, and Ryan Blaney.
All sorts of stats have been spruiked in the aftermath of the Team Penske driver’s win. The most damning in the anti-playoffs camp is the three-time champion’s average finishing position of 17.11 putting him 13th among the full-time drivers.
Top three drivers Chase Elliott averaged 11.72, Christopher Bell averaged 12.81, and Kyle Larson averaged 12.91 by the season’s end. They all failed to make the final four.
So how did Logano win the title? He won at a dramatic Nashville regular season race that featured a record five overtime finishes. That got him into the Round of 16.
He won the first playoff race at Atlanta, giving him automatic entry into the Round of 12 but so mediocre was his Round of 12 that he got bundled out at the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL race, only to make it in when Hendrick Motorsports’ Alex Bowman was disqualified for being underweight.
That put Logano eighth in the standings. Then he went on to win on a fuel-saving strategy at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in the Round of 8 to book a Championship 4 berth. Then he won at Phoenix and took the title.
“I don’t like people talking that way.”@joeylogano addresses the #NASCARPlayoffs and his run to the title. pic.twitter.com/m9s6V8Bl3B
— NASCAR (@NASCAR) November 11, 2024
So what does Logano think of all the conjecture?
“The playoff system in other sports is not much different than what this is. You can have a great regular season. It seeds you better for the playoffs. That doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to go all the way to the Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup Finals or the NBA Finals,” said Logano.
“It doesn’t matter. It might help you. It’s the same way in NASCAR, the way we have the rules now, is that you set yourself up much better. You look at the way we came into the playoffs versus the #5 (Kyle Larson), the #45 (Tyler Reddick), those guys that scored 15 playoff points for winning the regular season championship. That’s three wins’ worth of points in three races. That’s hard to make up that amount of points.
“They have the same opportunity to go out there and win and move on to the next round. So for someone to say this isn’t real, it’s a bunch of bullshit in my opinion. That’s wrong. This is something that everyone knows the rules when the season starts.
“We figured out how to do it the best and figured out how to win. It’s what our team has been able to do for the last three years. So I don’t like people talking that way because if the rules were the old way, we would play it out differently, wouldn’t we?”
There is a school of thought that the most consistent drivers deserve to win the title. In the case of Supercars, Will Brown has been more consistent than Triple Eight teammate Broc Feeney and for that, he leads the championship by a healthy margin going into the Adelaide 500.
Logano’s season is characterised by delivering when it mattered most. Perhaps there would be less animosity if Logano had been better in the regular season.
“Times change, right? And I don’t know if you have a lot of the moments that we have today without the playoff system that we have,” Logano explained.
“Do you want to see the championship crown with three races to go? Because that’s what used to happen. That’s pretty boring. You’ve got do-or-die moments. You’ve got the pressure. You’ve got all these things going on the last 10 weeks. You have guys trying to get into the playoffs.
“You have that storyline. How many storylines could we make? It’s amazing. For people to complain, it makes me mad. It makes me frustrated to hear that.”
Ultimately, the format isn’t Logano’s fault. It’s the same for everyone and one team and its driver was better than anyone else at figuring out how to win it. Was Logano the best all year long? Perhaps not, the stats paint that picture pretty clearly, but he delivered when it mattered and for that, Logano is the champion.
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