JOEY LOGANO – No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion – POLE-WINNING PRESS CONFERENCE – “Hopefully, we’ll finish where we start. It’s been an amazing few weeks if you think about the Daytona 500 and everything that comes along with that, and then coming down here to Atlanta and starting first is special, especially for me here at this race track. I remember sitting in the corner and watching drivers up here talking about their qualifying run and racing Legends cars out front here for years, so there are a lot of memories here. You guys see the picture over there when you walk in with David and Reed when were young and racing here. Obviously, anything to be in victory lane here is a very special place for me. I don’t know what’s going on lately. Everything is going well and we’re just trying to keep the old train rolling here. It’s going great and we’ll see what happens on Sunday.”
HOW CONFIDENT WERE YOU IN THAT FINAL ROUND OF QUALIFYING? “I felt like we definitely left some out in the second round. The first round we went out and the car was money. It felt perfect. I told Todd, ‘It’s good. I don’t know what to tell you.’ That’s special because you don’t get those cars very often, so we didn’t touch it and we got a little bit too loose. I had to lift off of two on the second run, so we gave up some speed there and were still second. I said, ‘OK, as long as we tighten this thing up and I run it just as hard, hopefully we can win the pole.’ I felt confident that my car could do it, I just had to hit the line just right. You’re going so fast around here that if you hit the bump just the wrong way it will jerk your car up a lane and it’s over, it will make your car looser. If you overcorrect just a little bit, you lose the yaw in your car and you’re up the race track. It’s a fast, technical race track, which is a big challenge because I remember the first time I came here I qualified 42nd, and was completely confused on what to do. I actually told Todd, ‘This isn’t a place that we qualify very well,’ and we haven’t in the past before. Once again, this is one of those tracks we focused the whole time in practice on qualifying trim today. We never came out of qualifying trim and focused on trying to make speed with our race car and it paid off once again. As long as we keep working hard, we’re seeing results.”
WERE YOU SURPRISED TO RUN THAT KIND OF LAP ON THOSE TIRES ON A TRACK THAT IS SO ABRASSIVE? “Yes and no. Our first run today in practice we went faster on our second run on scuffs, so I knew there was grip that stays in the tires for at least two runs. I didn’t know about the third run, but apparently a third run also, and the track temperature obviously came down. It’s really cold out there, so I think with the track temp coming down and tires, for some reason, they hold some decent speed in them still. It’s probably right at the limit, though. Probably the next run after this we probably would take a pretty big jump down on lap times. I’m a little bit surprised, but maybe not that much.”
