Handling Goes Away on GameStop Toyota and Logano Settles for 15th in Texas

Post Race Highlights:

  • Joey Logano and the GameStop team qualified 12th for Friday evening’s event at Texas Motor Speedway after struggling with a loose car during time trials.
  • It look only two laps for Logano to break into the top-10 and he rode around eighth early before the first pit stop at lap 48 to try and improve on a car that was terribly loose into the corners.
  • The No. 20 GameStop pit crew had great stops all night long and on several occasions, got Logano out one or more positions ahead of where they came in the pits.
  • Around lap 75, Logano reported that the car was getting looser and looser and he was doing all he could “to just try and hang on.” During this stretch, he fell back as far as 15th.
  • On lap 90, the GameStop team decided to make wholesale changes to the No. 20 Toyota, including changing a shock, adding rubbers and making dramatic wedge adjustments.
  • Logano reported 20 laps later that the changes didn’t seem to do anything to the car’s handling, so on the next stop, the team made more changes, including adding nose weight and dropping the track bar. During that stop, Logano lost a lap.
  • Late in the race, Logano was able to get himself back on the lead lap, but the car’s handling never really improved and he struggled home for a 15th-place finish.

Logano’s Post-Race Thoughts:

“I don’t really know what happened with the GameStop Toyota tonight. We just lost the handle early on the car and absolutely nothing that we tried worked. By the end of the night, they got the car handling maybe 20-percent better than it was in the beginning, but that’s not a lot considering some of the major adjustments that we made during the race. You can’t change shocks, add nose weight and other things and not change the handling of the car more than that. We will have to take a look at the car and see if there is something wrong or what. Sad part is, if we hadn’t lost a lap, I think we could have finished sixth or seventh.

“It’s really disappointing because I want to get a win here in Texas for GameStop. They always bring a lot of people to these races and it would be good to get to celebrate with them in Victory Lane at some point in their homestate. This was not the showing they deserved. We just really need to figure out what happened between practice and the race. The car was decent in practice. But something dramatically changed between practice and the race. We will go back to the drawing board and figure it out I’m sure. Just hate it for GameStop tonight.”

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