1,000 Greatest Drivers: Joey Logano

The luckiest driver in NASCAR history.

After reviewing Ryan Blaney on the one-year anniversary of his championship yesterday, I review Logano on the two-year anniversary of his second championship. I have been rather down on Logano and calling him overrated for a long time. Part of it is that he was just the most hyped driver of his generation and it is fundamentally clear at this point that he is not the best millennial driver and that it looks like when all is said and done Kyles Busch and Larson will almost certainly be the top two, but the other part of it is that while he is always very good he seems to never lead or hardly ever lead any statistical categories. If you look at my statistical table for him, he only leads wins in 2015 (a season I already argued was overrated) and poles in 2015 and 2016, and you could argue poles are one of the least significant statistics because they don’t really reflect race pace. When comparing him especially to drivers of the past who had a lot less stability in their teams or had injuries or weren’t able to have winning cars until much later in their careers, I can’t help thinking both Logano’s win count and championship count are vastly inflated compared to the level of his talent. While it did not age well when I wrote “Mark Martin may have thought Logano could become one of the greatest drivers ever in NASCAR, but he was wrong.” at the start of the year he won his first title, I still don’t think this is totally wrong now because he peaked in a sterile era that did not have great competition and he rarely led any sort of statistical categories, I will admit that he’s been very successful as a career compiler and his career statistics certainly look better in retrospect than they ever felt watching him at the time. I don’t deny his greatness, but I definitely have my reservations about his career. And I really hope he does not win his third title this year. If he wins at Phoenix, I will likely rate him C+. If he does not win the title, I will rate him C. If he wins the title but does not win at Phoenix like Blaney last year, I’ll be on the fence.