The 2022 NASCAR season came to a close this past Sunday (Nov. 6) outside of Phoenix.
While the Camping World Truck Series race finished with a late restart and an up-for-grabs battle between three drivers, the Xfinity and Cup series crossed the line with a bit of an anticlimactic ending. The Cup Series, which had featured 19 different winners, watched as all the drama that had been built through the opening race at the LA Coliseum turned into a beatdown by a driver claiming his second championship with a top organization.
That Joey Logano, age 32, notched his second title is not a huge surprise. Finding a home at Team Penske after being released from the team that gave him his start, Joe Gibbs Racing, has given a glimpse at the talent Logano was supposed to possess. His four full years at JGR look bad, as his best points finish came in his second Cup season, 2010, when he was 16th. When he parted ways with JGR after 2012, he had scored only two Cup wins and looked more like a never-will-be than a future star.
Now, after 10 years with Penske, Logano has notched 29 more wins and both of his championships. His confidence, cockiness, brashness, talents, and racing acumen have found a nexus, and there is little reason to expect that he will suddenly flounder or go winless. If anything, only now might he be rounding into form.
For Logano, that’s fantastic. For many of us, this past Sunday’s championship race came with a bit of a dud. Logano’s dominance at a track where passing looked limited tells much of the story. However, it should be recognized that every other team had just as much opportunity to put together a race-winning car, but his team just did it better.
The beatdown, more notably, is the more challenging factor. Not that Logano demoralized the other three championship contenders, but rather that no one really seemed able to make a move to do anything that would have changed the outcome. That his closest competition came from his teammate Ryan Blaney says more about how far out front Penske was than anything about the other drivers.
That is the challenge here.
It is impossible to script late-race heroics, like when the field seemed to gift Jimmie Johnson his seventh title by leaving him a lane to drive through on the final restart at Homestead back in, um, 1938, or really 2016 (it just seems so long ago at this point).
Watch it again and smirk. It’s not the overtime restart that did it; the win came when Kyle Larson, Kevin…
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