There’s an old saying that age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.
On Saturday night at Bristol Motor Speedway, Joey Logano provided roughly 500 laps of evidence.
The three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion didn’t exactly sneak up on anyone. He led the opening stage, had a fast Team Penske Ford and spent much of the night lurking near the front.
But when the Bristol Night Race turned into the sort of nine-lap knife fight that makes this half-mile concrete madhouse famous, Logano did what veterans do.
He waited.
Then, when Ty Gibbs and Carson Hocevar got busy beating the tar out of each other, Logano stepped through the wreckage and stole the whole damn thing.
Logano won Saturday night’s Bristol Night Race, scoring his third victory of the season and moving himself squarely into the championship conversation after a summer that had left the No. 22 Team Penske Ford well outside the title picture.
Kyle Larson finished second, 1.2 seconds behind, while Hocevar was third. Christopher Bell finished fourth and Gibbs came home fifth.
And for Logano, it was less about brute force than being in precisely the right place when Bristol finally decided to eat its young.
“I love NASCAR racing,” Logano said. “This is so much frickin’ fun and to watch to be a part of it is electric. Being here at Bristol. Hearing the fans scream and yell. What else can you want?”
For much of the night, the answer appeared to be somebody other than Logano.
Larson, who started from the pole, led the opening 40 laps. The beginning of the race was punctuated by an emotional tribute to Kyle Busch on lap 18, when fans throughout the Bristol grandstands waved yellow towels as the tributes to the two-time Cup champion continued.
With Friday’s practice and qualifying sessions washed out by weather, NASCAR scheduled a competition caution. Larson pitted, but Logano elected to stay out, taking the lead with Austin Cindric, Ryan Blaney, Chris Buescher and Chase Briscoe following him.
Then Erik Jones lost a rear tire and spun, bringing out the second caution.
The leaders who had stayed out pitted, leaving Logano by himself at the front.
When the green flag returned on lap 102, Logano and Larson settled into a 23-lap brawl for the stage win.
Logano won it.
Blaney was the next driver to gamble, staying out to begin Stage 2. He led every lap of the stage, which was shortened by two laps after Cody Ware spun.
Gibbs and Logano were the big movers after pitting, finishing second and third. Larson, meanwhile, was buried in ninth.
Then came another dose of Bristol irony.
Larson managed to get into the back of his Hendrick Motorsports teammate William Byron entering pit road.
Because apparently running 500 laps around a concrete blender wasn’t stressful enough.
Blaney led the field off pit road and remained in front until lap 326, when Gibbs finally worked his way past after spending several laps stalking the No. 12 Ford.
The race began to resemble something approaching normal.
Then Bristol remembered where it was.
Green-flag pit stops began around lap 377, and the field quickly became a confused collection of cars going in different directions.
Blaney and Hocevar were the last two cars on the lead lap to pit.
On lap 397, just as Blaney was diving toward pit road, Riley Herbst and Zane Smith got together. The caution flew, Blaney aborted his pit stop and was penalized for tagging the commitment line.
Technically, he was sent to the rear.
At Bristol near the end of a green flag pit stop cycle, of course, “the rear” is a fairly flexible concept.
Hocevar and Blaney had pit road mostly to themselves, but a large group of lapped cars took the wave-around. When the green flag returned on lap 405, Hocevar was the leader with Gibbs second—but fourth in line.
The ensuing restart was less a restart than a preview of the insanity to come.
By lap 432, Gibbs was looking for a way around Hocevar, using Alex Bowman as a pick on the inside and Cole Custer on the outside. Gibbs shot toward the middle and suddenly three cars were trying to use one piece of real estate.
Bowman drew the short straw.
He was squeezed into the outside wall while Gibbs and Custer somehow escaped.
Hocevar remained the leader.
The next restart came on lap 441, but lasted only two laps before Byron spun from contact with Josh Berry.
That set up the final restart on lap 459.
Gibbs led.
Hocevar was second.
And Blaney was right there. Blaney was able to get by but Hocevar tried to make a crossover move, Blaney attempted a block, Hocevar didn’t slow and Blaney was soon spinning into the outside wall and out of the race.
Gibbs and Hocevar had spent much of the closing stages trading the lead. Over roughly the final 100 laps, the two 23-year-olds had been swapping positions at the front while six of the race’s eight natural cautions interrupted the action.
Now they had nine laps to settle it.
Instead, they nearly settled it for everyone.
Gibbs and Hocevar began banging doors, allowing Larson, Bell and Logano to close rapidly.
Suddenly five cars were fighting for the same piece of Bristol.
That was when Logano’s experience became worth considerably more than its weight in tires.
He picked his way through the chaos, rocketed into the lead and immediately began putting distance between himself and Larson.
Behind him, the young guns were still trying to figure out who had done what to whom.
Logano was already gone.
“I thought there for a minute I was like, ‘OK, I might just finish third or fourth here tonight,’ and then they all kind of worked their way up and I was like, ‘Well, Merry Christmas to me,’” Logano said. “I got a gift there.”
He certainly did.
“Come on, Bristol. I hear you down here. That was awesome,” he said. “We had a good race car. Team Penske put together a great car. We led the first stage there and you know it’s gonna get aggressive there at the end and we were in the right place at the right time.”
That last part might be the understatement of the night.
The victory is particularly significant for Logano because of where he has come from in the standings.
After Sonoma in June, Logano sat 20th in the points.
Now, after consecutive strong runs and Saturday night’s victory, he has climbed to third.
“We’re in the hunt now,” Logano said. “We’re right where we need to be. We had a solid run last week and capitalized again with huge points again tonight, so we’re there.”
Larson’s second-place finish was hardly a consolation prize.
It was his third consecutive top-five finish to open the Chase and moved him into the points lead, one point ahead of Denny Hamlin.
Still, Larson knows how quickly things can change.
“It’s good. It’s good. But there’s still so much racing left,” Larson said. “Just got to keep having good consistent days.”
He knows what is coming.
“We’re going to some good tracks for us but also good tracks for the Toyotas are Vegas and Kansas, Charlotte,” Larson said. “It could easily change a lot here in the next upcoming weeks.”
Gibbs, meanwhile, was left to wonder what might have been.
The night had been particularly meaningful for the Joe Gibbs Racing driver, who was driving the M&M’s Toyota as part of the weekend-long tribute to Kyle Busch and the Busch family.
“It was such a special weekend, especially for M&M’s and for Samantha and their family,” Gibbs said. “I’m just proud to be a part of it and proud to have something to do with it.”
He had the car to win.
He just didn’t quite have the final two corners.
“I just needed to get down in 1 and 2 better and I just missed it,” Gibbs said. “It was unfortunate but we’ll keep getting better and we’ll keep working hard.”
Then there was Hocevar, who finished third but became one half of the post-race fireworks when Blaney confronted him on pit road. Shoves, then punches were thrown and the two had to be separated.
For now, the official results show Hocevar third, Bell fourth and Gibbs fifth.
Josh Berry was sixth, followed by Bubba Wallace, Denny Hamlin, Byron and Ryan Preece.
Among the other Chase drivers, Cindric finished 11th, Buescher 13th, Daniel Suarez 14th, Tyler Reddick 18th, Chase Elliott 23rd and Chase Briscoe 27th.
Blaney was scored 33rd.
And Logano?
He left Bristol with another trophy, another big pile of points and a reminder to everyone else in the Chase that experience still counts for something.
Especially when everyone else is too busy punching each other in the face to notice.
“For the haters, baby,” Logano said as the Bristol crowd serenaded him with boos.
There are worse ways to spend a Saturday night.
The Chase now heads to Kansas Speedway, where Chase Elliott is the defending winner.
And if Bristol taught us anything, the only safe assumption is that Kansas will find some entirely new way to make everyone miserable.
RACE RESULTS
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.
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