The finale of the 2022 NASCAR Cup Series season wound up being a nearly perfect summation of the imperfect campaign that it had just wrapped up. A most apropos period stamped at the end of a story that had been written since the first green flag was waved over NASCAR’s 74th season, 274 days earlier in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
There was plenty of drama at Phoenix Raceway on Sunday. There was controversy. There was good racing. At one point, the Championship 4 were: 1. Leading. 2. Running third. 3. Running in the top 10 despite believing that his engine was blowing up. 4. Fighting to get back onto the lead lap after a run-in with the car that was now running third.
But in the end, not even all of that could quite get out from underneath the cloud of a story that no one saw coming. The latest stanza in a broken record of a theme that has dogged the latter stages of what had been one NASCAR’s most remarkable seasons. Bad news acting like an annoying lapped car that refused to get out of the way.
“I think that this has been one of the craziest years in NASCAR history. It has to be, right? It certainly has been from my perspective,” said Joey Logano, shortly after becoming only the 17th multitime champion of NASCAR’s premier series. “We are definitely going to celebrate. But there is also a lot of work to do this winter. A lot of introspection. There always is, but this winter feels like there’s a lot to be done by everyone in the sport.”
Logano drives for Penske Racing, a team with whom he has now won 29 races and a pair of Cup Series titles. But before he signed with Roger Penske in 2012, he spent his first four full seasons at stock car racing’s highest level as a driver for Joe Gibbs Racing. He had been anointed as the next Jeff Gordon or Tony Stewart, famously nicknamed “Sliced Bread,” as in “greater than …” But he was also thrown into the deep end at 18 years old and indeed drowned, labeled by many as a bust after “only” two wins in the same car that Stewart had used to win 33 races and become a legend.
Among his de facto bosses at JGR was Coy Gibbs, son of Joe, the team’s namesake and a Pro Football Hall of Famer who had just wrapped up his second stint as head coach of Washington, with Coy, a former all-star linebacker at Stanford, on his staff. As Logano was moving on in 2013, Coy Gibbs was moving up the ladder at…
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