By: Zach Catanzareti, Staff Writer
Joey Logano is grateful after he flipped his No. 22 Team Penske Ford Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway.
Leading the outside lane, Logano got turned head-on into the tri-oval wall before getting hit by Chase Briscoe’s No. 19 and going airborne and sliding for hundreds of feet on his roof.
On Tuesday, the three-time Cup Series champion spoke to Will Buxton on SPEED to open up on the dramatic crash that swallowed up a dozen racecars late in the race and explain how the NASCAR safety team recovered him from the inverted car afterwards.
“You go upside down and you’re like, ‘Oh no.’ You know it’s happening,” Logano said of going airborne. “It got quiet and then I slid forever. And then you stop and you see fuel coming out of the throttle body and it just doesn’t look good.
“You’re just sitting upside down and I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I can get out if I have to get out.’ And that’s honestly where I got a little bit nervous.”
Following the moment of panic, Logano said the safety crew were there in a matter of seconds.
“Then immediately, NASCAR officials were there,” he said. “The safety crew was there — they were in my window talking to me, telling me the fire extinguishers were ready. They started flipping the car back over. It went perfectly smooth.
“As bad as it was, the experience itself it sucked, but they did an amazing job flipping this thing over smoothly. They knew exactly what to do, there was no screwing around. They put this tow strap between the windshield bed and the hood, they couldn’t get it all the way through. Then a guy just had a pull on the other end ready to go to pull it all the way through, it’s like they’ve done it 1,000 times from what it looked like. It was amazing.”
When he exited the destroyed racecar, the main priority was now to reunite with his family. The crash had severed the radio antenna, which made it impossible for him to confirm with them or his team that he was OK.
“Who I felt bad for was my wife and team because I couldn’t communicate,” he said. “I kept trying to connect my radios back in to try and say, ‘Hey, I’m OK.’ Nobody knew I was OK because the in-car camera went out, everything went out when I flipped.”
A humbling experience followed when he finally returned to his family.
“I got back to the bus and my kids are crying,” he said. “I’m like, ‘dad’s OK! I’m good!’ There is an emotional task on everybody, not just the driver in the car.
“I found out a lot of people love me, that was the bright side of it.”
