Joey Logano: I can’t criticize Denny Hamlin’s 3-wide try at Kansas
Joey Logano was simply an innocent bystander that got caught up in someone else’s crash at Kansas.
Logano was in fifth place shortly after a late-race restart Saturday night. Ahead of him, Brad Keselowski, Kyle Larson and Denny Hamlin were all vying for second. Hamlin, the driver in fourth entering turn 3, dove between Keselowski and Larson, hoping to pass them both at the same time.
It didn’t work. Hamlin started to spin and so did Keselowski. Hamlin clipped Larson and then collected Logano, who had nowhere to go as the crash happened in front of him.
Does Logano, who is winless through the first 11 races of the season, have any hard feelings towards Hamlin for the move? No. Not at all. Heck, he even said he would do the same thing if he was in Hamlin’s position.
“I feel like I am one of the hardest racers out there and I would be quite the hypocrite if I asked why he was racing so hard,” Logano said Friday at Dover. “If you ask me, that is what fans show up to the race track to see … They don’t expect us to just say, ‘oh, go ahead’. They expect us to race and that is what they pay money to see. I am going to race hard. I know that. I have done that in the past and I will continue to do that. When Denny made that move I didn’t blame him. He made a run on the backstretch and had to do something with it. He got in a bad aero spot and both of them got loose.”
Logano had 28 top-10 finishes in 36 races in 2015. This season he has six top 10s. But while the top-10 rate has declined so far in 2016, Logano is content with his team’s performance. The crashes he was caught up in at Talladega and Kansas resulted in his first finishes outside the top 20.
“We want to break through and get that win but if you look at the consistency in our team it is still there,” Logano said. “With the last two finishes you may not agree with that but the consistency of where we were running is there. It is not like we have had races where we have been way off and if we have started way off in a race we have been able to recover and get a top-10 out of it … We just haven’t really gotten the finishes the last few weeks to really show for that.”
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
