Joey Logano scores victory of attrition at Texas

Joey Logano won the Würth 400 on Sunday afternoon at Texas Motor Speedway but it was hardly a straightforward affair.

This particular race will be defined by the narrative twists and turns it took to get there. For example, Kyle Larson and Austin Cindric combined to lead 150 of the 367 laps but neither were relevant to the finish.

Larson was leading late and lined up on the front row with Michael McDowell on a Lap 344 restart and just got beat to the throttle and push. It might have even been a jumped restart that race control never called.

"I just got predictable," Larson said. "Him and (Tyler) Reddick kind of anticipated it. I kind of launched away from (Blaney) and you're going slow so the pushes really matter and I just didn't have that behind me. They had me clear before (Turn) 1 and I was hoping he would leave me a lane for clean air but he closed it off and I got tight and got tight again in (Turns) 3 and 4."

Nevertheless, McDowell would lead (with much older left side tires) until getting beat by Logano on Lap 264. McDowell ended up crashing from third after getting tripped up by the dirty air from Ryan Blaney, who just got him for second.

NEW LEADER: LOGANO. pic.twitter.com/ueDUePmPnF

— FOX: NASCAR (@NASCARONFOX) May 4, 2025

Carson Hocevar led the first 22 laps from the pole and ultimately crashed out.

Here's what happened with Hocevar, Ware and Preece:#NASCAR | @TXMotorSpeedway pic.twitter.com/RxhVL2fbhU

— FOX: NASCAR (@NASCARONFOX) May 4, 2025

Josh Berry led 41 laps in the middle stages of the race but crashed from the lead on Lap 126.

Josh Berry goes around. pic.twitter.com/Fw8UoNsyDQ

— FOX: NASCAR (@NASCARONFOX) May 4, 2025

"The car was really good," Berry said. "I could tell early on that our car was really strong, especially after the first pit stop when we made an adjustment it was really good and we got out front and felt really good about it. Just started to approach the lap traffic. You have no choice but to run the opposite lane. Your car is never going to turn if you follow them.

"I went around the 62 on the outside and felt pretty decent about it. Then caught the 51 and was working on the 51 and hit that bump and got loose. I don’t know what I would do too much different. Obviously in these cars, especially at a place like this you are going to be fast, it is going to be uncomfortable and you are going to be on edge. Unfortunately it bit us today."

William Byron was leading when he collided with Cole Custer on pit road, significantly damaging his splitter, and once he lost the lead, his Hendrick No. 24 was never the same.

Chris Buescher ran top-five for a lot of the race and also suffered misfortune in the form of a flat right rear that sent him off the wall. Chase Elliott was making a move on Byron after the aforementioned pit stop incident and bottomed out over the bump in Turns 3 and 4, leading to a vibration that ended his chances to repeat.

Blaney started 24th and finished third.
Ross Chastain started 31st and finished second.
Joey Logano won from 27th.

It was a definition race of attrition that ended with Logano turning the narrative on a season that got off to a slow start in a way that draws parallels to his third championship campaign last season.

Champion-chips on the shoulder

Much to the chagrin of his detractors, Joey Logano and his Team Penske No. 22 team are the model of resilience, in the way they have success in the NextGen era especially.

Consider, Logano had yet to score a top-five through 10 races and had just one top-10 to his name as well. Techically, they got that top-five last weekend at Talladega but then came the disqualification for loosened rear spoiler bracing fasteners.

Logano has seen versions of this movie before and even told wife Brittany about a hunch leaving last weekend.

“I mean, there's always a story next week, right,” Logano said. “I told my wife last week before we left, I said, ‘Watch, we'll go win this one.’ It's just how we do stuff.’ Any time you kick us down, I feel like we come back 10 times harder, whatever that is in us. Definitely had a fast car today, and like I said, it's nice to change the storyline.”

His crew chief Paul Wolfe says his driver races best when there’s a bit of a chip on his shoulder.

“I think he likes it when you root against him because that really fires him up,” Logano.

And this is the kind of outcome, and dynamic, that makes a lot of people root against the No. 22 team. The defending champions, who won last year in the most historically unorthodox way possible, once again off to a slow start of sorts winning their way into the playoffs in the middle stages of the regular season in an attrition race.

Logano didn’t deny it.

“I think any time somebody says something about you, you can use it as motivation, whether it's good or bad,” Logano said. “When you have some negative comments and things like that, you have a chip on your shoulder. Well, ‘I'll prove you wrong’ and (reporters) want that story (because) it’s cool, right?

“I mean, I don't feel like I put more effort in one week over the others, but I think subconsciously there's something that happens. Something happens in the playoffs. There's something that happens when someone says something to you, right?”

Logano says everyone in the industry and life at large can relate to that chip and used the media he was speaking to as an analogy.

“If someone has something bad to say about an article you wrote, you are kind of like, ‘Oh, watch this, maybe I'll write a better one.’ I don't know what the next thing is for a reporter, but …

Logano conceded it might not be the best analogy but he said that everyone has that thing that challenges him in the same way his personal detractors do.

“Whatever that may be, a lot of times it just gives you a little extra motivation, a little chip on your shoulder, a little bit of want to shove it in their face a little bit,” Logano said.

Of McDowell

It wouldn’t have been the upset it sounds like five years ago but Michael McDowell genuinely came close to a season altering surprise victory.

For one, McDowell has come into his own as a fringe contender in recent years, first for Front Row Motorsports and now Spire Motorsports, both organizations that do not win enough to appear on most Round of 16 preseason predictions every February.

But McDowell always gets the most of his equipment, which is why he was lured to Spire this season on a multi-year deal at his age 40 season in the first place, and nearly outright won the race on older left side tires.

He snookered Larson to take the lead in the first place and took Logano all the way to the infield wall in the efforts to win his way into the playoffs for the third time in five years across two organizations.

McDowell ultimately crashed in the shifting air once Ryan Blaney took second from him.

“Obviously, we were on two tires and it was always going to be an uphill battle but we thought we had a good shot at it,” McDowell told a scrum in the garage. “We weren’t the best today but were fast enough to put ourselves in position … to have a fighting shot at it.

“Got a couple of good restarts and had one that was average but once (Logano) started to close in, I was right at the limit of doing everything I could. I haven’t seen the replay but I felt like I drove him as far down as you could without doing something crazy. He was still able to get there unfortunately.”

And the crash?

“Yeah, the 12 cleared me and took the air off and it just caught me off guard. I’ve been in dirty air all day but that particular spot caught me off guard. It stinks to leave here wadded up and not get a finish, not get a win, but we have really fast cars and we have an opportunity to do it more and as long as we keep doing it, we’ll have more shots at it. I’m just frustrated that I didn’t do a better job of staying out front.”

A double whammy for McDowell is that he didn’t win his way into the playoffs and also crashed, giving up 20-plus points in the process. He is now 26 points out of a provisional playoff spot when he would otherwise have been right on the cutline.

“For us, even if we lost the race, we could have finished third pretty easy and that’s what I’m frustrated about,” McDowell said. “We gave it our all and I’m proud of that but just frustrated to have not brought it home.”

He had a cheerleader watching from directly behind him too in Ross Chastain.

“There’s never been anyone in the series rooting for (McDowell) harder, not on his team, than I was,” Chastain said. “I wanted to see him win over that guy for sure.”

Tricky trick Texas

Kyle Larson was asked, after the race, if he was surprised by the number of crashes on Sunday or if the track was any different than anticipated.

“It didn’t change overnight,” Larson said with a laugh.

This is just what Texas Motor Speedway is right now and seems to be set to be for quite a while.

Despite a pavement that is no longer fresh black, it still has barely two usable grooves, and there’s still that treacherous bump in Turns 3 and 4 that unsettles the car if you run over it. That’s also the best case scenario.

The worst case is that it causes a vibration like it did to Elliott or the crash that bit Berry.

“It is just hard to get your car — to be really strong in 1 and 2 you are going to be on edge in 3 and 4,” Berry said. “I feel like my car was really good and that is how I felt. I definitely have to look back at it and see what I could have done differently but in the end I think I am more afraid of being slow than spinning out like that.”

Berry brought up the drastic differences between the two corners and finding a compromise set up is a challenge too. Turns 1 and 2 have 20 degrees of banking, while turns 3 and 4 have 24 degrees.

“It’s a tricky deal,” Blaney said.

Blaney also said the narrowness of the track keeps drivers pinned on each other.

“For one, there’s nowhere to go, so everyone goes crazy on restarts and just jams it in there,” he added. “Then you get out of the groove and you spin out. The groove is wearing but the track is not getting wider.

“So everyone gets more desperate to pass and they just shove it in there, and being that aggressive, it doesn’t always work out on a narrow, fast place like this.”

Chastain echoed that sentiment.

“It’s just a slick track,” Chastain said. “They repaved it and they repaved it at a time where they did it too good and there was too much grip but it’s losing grip. There’s the remnants of the (PJ1 Trackbite that isn’t going away) and there’s a lot of that Texas dirt all over the track, even when the wind isn’t blowing too much like it was today.

“But really, it’s the Cup Series and it’s okay to wreck cars and our owners tell us that it’s okay.”

Anecdotes

Denny Hamlin suffered a rare oil pan failure that forced him to finish 38th.

“It was blowing up for about a lap or so before it really detonated," Hamlin said. "I tried to keep it off to keep it from full detonating, that was they can diagnose exactly what happened to it. It’s tough to say exactly what it is, but they’ll go back and look at it and we’ll find out in a few weeks.”

There's kind of parallels to where Toyota cars were inexplicably suffering engine woes the past two years.

"I’ve had blown engines in two or three season in-a-row now where we didn’t have any issues several years prior to that," Hamlin said. "Just trying to develop I'm guessing and trying to get more. Certainly, we feel like we need to get a bit more power but this was unexpected for us."

Ryan Preece was left frustrated with Carson Hocevar over this incident and it isn't the first time there's been tension between them.

Here's what happened with Hocevar, Ware and Preece:#NASCAR | @TXMotorSpeedway pic.twitter.com/RxhVL2fbhU

— FOX: NASCAR (@NASCARONFOX) May 4, 2025

"He just seems to be proving me right over and over again," Preece said leaving the infield care center. "Just a really fast race car. Just unlucky on the pit cycle. We were doing things right and coming back through.

"And then just got ran into the fence by someone who doesn't have any respect for our equipment or any other driver out there. He'll have his day."

Hocevar was apologetic.

“I apologized to him and his guy, same with my guys, right?” Hocevar said to Bob Pockrass of FOX Sports. “Just got in there and started to slide up, and he got to the right rear, and I was already crossing somebody’s wake and got tight from him on my door and the car in front.

“I mean I’m out of the gas and have wheel, and I just didn’t predict to be in that spot, to panic, or to have to change directions, you have to predict it, and I didn’t, I just didn’t predict he would get there if I’m being honest. That’s on me, I wrecked myself, right?”

Results

Provisional playoff grid

Christopher Bell WWW
Kyle Larson WW
Denny Hamlin WW
William Byron W
Joey Logano W
Austin Cindric W
Josh Berry W
Chase Elliott +110
Tyler Reddick +109
Ryan Blaney +85
Bubba Wallace +78
Alex Bowman +56
Ross Chastain +53
Chris Buescher +27
Chase Briscoe +17
Ricky Stenhouse +12
---
Kyle Busch -12
Carson Hocevar -21
Ryan Preece -23
AJ Allmendinger -23
Michael McDowell -26
Austin Dillon -28
Ty Gibbs -32
John Hunter Nemechek -33
Daniel Suarez -34
Zane Smith -37
Todd Gilliland -38
Justin Haley -40
Erik Jones -49
Ty Dillon -54
Noah Gragson -82
Brad Keselowski -98
Riley Herbst -99
Cole Custer -113
Shane Van Gisbergen -120