By: Zach Catanzareti, Staff Writer
Joey Logano made it close, but the Toyota Owners 400 at Richmond Raceway was Martin Truex Jr.’s to take.
Jumping past Clint Bowyer for second spot, the No. 22 had less than five laps to reel in leader Truex. Unfortuantely for Logano, it wasn’t enough.
“I got there, I was just a couple laps late getting there,” Logano said. “I was able to get to the [No.] 19 [Truex] but it just wasn’t enough.”
Choosing a lane was a battle Logano was not going to win in his efforts to pass Truex.
“It is kind of a double-edged sword. You go to the bottom and you can’t get the drive to clear them and getting to the outside is pretty tough,” he said. “Just couldn’t get there. Ran out of time. Needed a few more laps.”
Leading 52 laps on the night, Logano again showed race-winning speed. However, it was mistakes that cost the No. 22 Team Penske Ford valuable track position for the final 148-lap green run to the checkered flag.
“We need to clean up some mistakes on our end,” he said. “We lost the lead there on a pit stop. We gotta get faster there. That is when we lost control of the race at that point and fell back to third. A decent green-flag cycle got us up.”
Coming back from the errors, Logano saw Truex and Clint Bowyer grow larger in his fron windshield.
“We reeled in the [Nos.] 19 and the 14 from pretty far back,” he said. “I was watching them race and thought if I was just patient and saved my tires — I saw them coming off the corner sideways every time. They were a little faster than me but I knew they were going to kill their stuff. And they did.”
With a fifth top-five finish of 2019, another race-winning car ending the day without a win is no happy result.
“We had a car that was capable of winning for the third week straight and we didn’t win,” he said. “That part is frustrating.”