Joey Logano Drives Dollar General Toyota into Victory Lane at Darlington Raceway.

Post Race Highlights:

• Joey qualified a strong fifth for Friday night’s NASCAR Nationwide Series event at Darlington Raceway.
• Logano ran in the top-10 all night long. He fell back to seventh early in the race as the car was tight in the center of the corners.
• The No. 20 Dollar General team was one fire all night in the pits. During the first stop, they made adjustments to loosen in the car up, took four tires and fuel and in the process, came in the pits fifth and came out second.
• On the ensuing restart, Logano got out ahead of his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Denny Hamlin and spent two laps up front. Hamlin got back around Logano as he settled into second.
• The Dollar General Toyota got loose on the next run but Logano was able to keep his car in the top-five. During a long green-flag run, Logano’s car continued to get better and better and he eventually found himself back up to second place.
• Late in the race, Logano restarted third and pushed Elliott Sadler to the lead. A quick caution meant another restart. This time, Logano once again tried to give Sadler a push to the lead. Unfortunately, the push got Sadler a little sideways, who then went across the nose of Logano’s teammate Hamlin and got into the wall.
• On the final green-white-checker finish, Logano jumped ahead of Hamlin with a push of his own from Brad Keselowski and held on for the final two laps to grab the victory. The win was his first-career NASCAR Nationwide Series victory at Darlington Raceway.
• Logano led on three different occasions for a total of four laps. That ties a record for the fewest number of laps led by a NASCAR Nationwide Series winner.
• The win was Logano’s second-straight win NASCAR Nationwide Series win (he also won last week’s race at Talladega) and his third of the season (also won at California). Logano now has 12-career NASCAR Nationwide Series victories. It’s the first time he’s won back-to-back races since 2009.
• With the win, Dollar General customers will receive 20-percent off their entire online order at DollarGeneral.com this Monday. Offer is good only online at DollarGeneral.com and only this coming Monday.

Logano’s Post-Race Thoughts:

“First, I’m really excited to finally get Dollar General a victory here tonight. They came over to Joe Gibbs Racing this season and we absolutely love having them as a supporter of our race team. We’ve been wanting to bring them some success both on the Cup and Nationwide side this year and we’ve just had some really bad luck. We’ve not finished like we wanted with them on the side of our Toyotas and I know Brian (Scott) has had a lot of just plain old bad luck. So to finally get them a win and have them in Victory Lane means a lot. We all hope this is just the first of many we can get for them the rest of the year. It’s just too bad Rick (Dreiling) and his entire staff weren’t here to celebrate the win with us.

“Second, I need to apologize to Elliott Sadler. That isn’t the way I wanted to win the race. I think the race was between he, myself and Denny (Hamlin). On that next to last restart, I was able to give Elliott a good push and got him out into the lead. I thought he was gone but we had another caution and we all lined up in the same order. I figured we would do the same thing again – I would try and push him to the lead and get myself up to second. I don’t know what happened, I don’t know if he spun his tires or what, but when we started to go he just got crossed up. I backed off, but by that time, he was already sideways and then he got into Denny and turned into the outside wall. It’s just really, really bittersweet. You want to win races but you don’t want to have that big of effect on someone’s season. Elliott and I are good friends and he’s the last person I’d want to take out of a championship. I just felt really bad about that deal. I gave him a call from Victory Lane but didn’t get a chance to talk to him. You can bet I’m going to search him out right away and talk to him as soon as I can.

“We had a strong Dollar General Toyota tonight. Denny really was the class of the field, but his car started going away and a few of us were getting better. It was a three-car race there at the end. On that final restart, I just got a good jump and was able to hold Denny off. He was coming, but with the green-white-checker there wasn’t enough time. It feels good to get back into Victory Lane and win another one of these things. Adam (Stevens) and the guys are really on their game right now and it feels good. Hopefully we can do this again in Charlotte in a couple of weeks.”