Legitimacy (li-ji-tuh-muh-see) noun. The state or quality of being legitimate.
Synonyms: rightfulness, lawfulness, legality
That’s a word that has been used a lot since Sunday evening, when Joey Logano earned his third NASCAR Cup Series championship by outrunning three other title contenders to win the race and the title at Phoenix Raceway. Spoken so much that the 34-year-old surefire first-ballot Hall of Famer was asked about it shortly after he had earned two trophies in one night to become only the 10th driver in NASCAR‘s 76-year history to become a three-time series champion.
Big surprise, he didn’t like that very much.
“For someone to say this isn’t real, that’s a bunch of bulls—. In my opinion, that’s wrong,” Logano said. “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. You know what I mean?”
We do, but that won’t stop the questioning of it. Why? Because of those very rules that he pointed out. More accurately, because of the promise given when those rules were introduced initially two decades ago and emphatically repeated when they were overhauled one decade ago. A tiered postseason elimination-based bracket that trims the field from 16 to eight to four to one, a model that is the modus operandi for stick-and-ball sports but at the time was a wildly radical departure for motorsports. That promise? A stated goal to place “an emphasis on winning.”
Wining isn’t something that Logano did a lot of during the 26-race “regular season,” with only one victory earned: a demolition derby five-OT affair at Nashville Superspeedway that saw Logano, who was running 15th when the race reached its originally scheduled distance, slice and dice his way through the chaos to earn his 33rd career victory and punch his ticket into the NASCAR playoffs.
Once that postseason started, he won its very first race at the Daytona-like Atlanta Motor Speedway, advancing to the Round of 12. In that round’s final event he was initially eliminated, but then moved on when Alex Bowman was
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