NASCAR looking for new ways to prevent airborne crashes

On Tuesday, however, NASCAR was searching for ways to slow cars down at Daytona International Speedway.

Joey Logano was one of five drivers participating in an aerodynamic exercise focussed on discouraging lift-off on vehicles at restrictor plate tracks. 

“Yesterday was an interesting day with a lot of different packages coming from NASCAR,” Logano said. “The goal is to try and lower the lift-off speed. When these cars turn around backwards, it creates lift. That’s when you see cars get real light. When they’re already light — and get hit — you sometimes see them roll over, right? We’ve seen that happen. So we’re trying to figure out ways to create downforce — backwards. I guess it’s what we’re trying to do. 

“It’s easier said than done. We can probably do that pretty easily. But doing that and not effecting the racing and not adding a bunch of costs to the teams is the challenge. There’s a few different avenues that they tried in trying to achieve that goal. I feel like they’ve made some good gains on it. But as a driver, it might seem good to me. As a team, they might have to talk some things out on how to implement certain things the right way and keep us all from ourselves, basically. Control ourselves from ourselves. We learned a lot Even with five cars I thought we collected some good data from that.”

Ryan Newman, Erik Jones, Alex Bowman and Danica Patrick also participated in the two-day Goodyear tire test. Logano made four 20-lap runs in the five-car pack testing out different tire compounds.

As the 2015 Daytona 500 winner, having Logano among the participants was a wise choice. He has not finished worse than sixth in his last three starts at the 2.5-mile track. 

He admits testing at Daytona for the Coke Zero 400, “doesn’t hurt”, Team Penske Fords have won two of the last five races on the super speedway and four of the last five events at Talladega. 

“Daytona testing for a race car driver isn’t very exciting, not much I can do,” Logano added. “We’ll just be making single-car runs for the rest of the day. But when you can find speed in your car, in single-car runs, sometimes it transfers over. If nothing else, qualifying up front is nice to get up there and try to take the 24 car (Chase Elliott) off of the pole. Seems like that just happens here all the time.

“We want to be able to fix that, from our side of it. This gives us an opportunity to try some things. A lot of times when you’re down here in February or July, you don’t want to put a bunch of laps on your motor and making all these changes. Here’s an opportunity for us to make a lot of laps on our motors and change things and really get a clean read on what’s better or not with the data on the car.”

Still, Logano is searching for his first win in 2017. Despite wrecking at Phoenix Raceway, after starting on the pole, Logano is enjoying a remarkable average finish of 8.4 after the first seven races. He has six top-10 finishes and remains fifth in the standings after posting a season-high third-place result last weekend at Texas Motor Speedway. 

“I just want to win,” Logano said. “That’s me. I’m not happy unless I win. I’ll be mad if I finish second. That’s the 22 team. We have one goal in mind and everything short of that — I don’t want to say failure, it’s not a failure when you can learn something. But it’s not our goal. We don’t achieve our goal unless we win — that’s our approach. 

“We have better days than others sometimes and we know that. But we haven’t put a whole race together. When we’ve had fast race cars, we’ve had pit road penalties or weird things happen where we don’t score stage points and we don’t put ourselves in position to win. We put ourselves in the position to get a top-five again. Last week, we had a 10th-place car and we put ourselves in position to win, but we weren’t fast enough to win the race. 

“So we have to get both of those and put them together so we can put ourselves in Victory Lane — which I feel is right around the corner.”