GoBowling.com 400 Race Preview

• CLINCHED INTO THE PLAYOFFS: With Joey Logano’s fifth-place finish at Indianapolis Motor Speedway last weekend, a career-best at the track and his seventh top-five finish of the season, he officially clinched a spot in the 2014 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Chase for himself and the No. 22 Shell-Pennzoil Ford team. It will be Logano’s second-straight appearance in the Chase after he finished eighth in the series point standings last season. Heading into Pocono, Logano is positioned sixth in the Chase Grid standings and ninth in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series regular season point standings.
• STILL A STATS LEADER: Logano last won at Richmond in April, but the 24-year-old driver is still one of the best in the series throughout the course of the season, backed up by the 2014 stats. Logano has the second-highest overall average running position in the race, the highest at the mid-race point, the most laps run in the top 15, the third-highest driver rating and he has led the fourth-most laps of any driver in the series. Logano is only four top-five finishes away from establishing a new career high, which he set last season at Team Penske.
• TV STAR: This past week, Logano taped a commercial at Charlotte Motor Speedway for NASCAR and ESPN promoting the upcoming Chase. The commercial will help explain the Chase format to fans and will highlight the drivers that are already locked into the post-season activities.
• JOEY THE BOWLER: Leading into the GoBowling.com 400 at Pocono this weekend, Logano took part in a bowling tournament to help promote the event a couple of weeks ago in Mooresville, NC. Logano and his team of media members and crew members from the No. 22 Shell-Pennzoil Ford defeated the team of Kasey Kahne in the head-to-head format. Logano also won $1,000 for his charity, the Joey Logano Foundation, in the process.
• SEE LOGANO AT POCONO: As part of the GoBowling.com 400 weekend, Logano will make a stop at the Tricky Triangle Club at Pocono on Sunday, August 3. Logano will appear at 9:20 am ET. Tickets for the event can be purchased via the Pocono Raceway website.

IS THERE A LITTLE LESS PRESSURE ON THE TEAM NOW THAT YOU ARE OFFICIALLY LOCKED INTO THE CHASE?

“Not really. Even though it wasn’t mathematically, we have felt like we were in the Chase for the last few weeks. The only pressure I feel is wanting to win a couple of more races before the Chase begins and get a few more bonus points. I’m happy that we can go into Richmond knowing that we have nothing to worry about this year. There will be no pressure to try and make the Chase. We are already in. And I think that is a result of my team behind me. I have the best guys in the garage in my book. We work so well together both on and off the track. You see it when we are at the track and when they are just working in the shop during the week. It’s cool to see a group like that. I think we just need to keep doing what we are doing, get a little extra momentum building at the right time and go into the Chase as a hot team. There is no reason that this team can’t win the title this year. We all believe it.”

WHEN YOU LOOK AT THE STATS, DO YOU REALIZE YOU HAVE HAD A BETTER YEAR THAN YOUR RESULTS SHOW?

“For sure. We’ve had a lot of bad luck during the middle part of the season here. If we could have finished just somewhere near where we were running during some of those races, I think we would be a top-three car in the points right now. But you can’t worry about that. All we do as a team is just say we know we were running well, even if our results don’t show it. Hopefully we have gotten some of that bad luck out of the way early, and we won’t have those type of engine issues or mechanical problems when we get into the Chase. That is important with this new format. We need to make sure we keep ourselves in it all the way to (the final race at) Homestead to have a chance to win this thing.”