Joey Logano made it abundantly clear that he believes Carson Hocevar’s reputation was the reason why he was not able to win at Bristol Motor Speedway on Saturday night.
In the closing laps of the race Hocevar was able to drive around the outside of Ty Gibbs on a restart with 9 laps to go to get the lead. However, Gibbs battled back on the inside and made contact with Hocevar as they exited off of turn 2. Heavier contact was made on the exit of turn 4 as Hocevar appeared to try and pinch Gibbs on the exit. The contact saw Hocever get squirrely as he crossed the start/finish line. Nevertheless, he was able to fully clear Gibbs.
Gibbs then gave him the bumper heading into turn 1 and pushed him up the track. He then got the bumper from Kyle Larson, who got a big run on the outside. While all of that was happening, Joey Logano was able to sneak below both Gibbs and Hocevar and get the lead with 7 laps left. Hocevar would clear Gibbs, but Logano pulled away by about three car lengths on the exit of turn 2. Logano continued to extend his lead. With 3 laps left, he had a five car length gap.
When it was all said and done, Logano won by over a second and Larson door slammed Hocevar at the line to get the second position.
In an interview with Eric Estepp, Logano shared that Hocevar likely would have won the race and been raced a lot differently by Ty Gibbs and Kyle Larson if it was not for his reputation in the garage area.
He said, “Hocevar probably wins that race if he doesn’t have the reputation he has. I feel like that’s a fact. Ty Gibbs went in there and straight up punted him. Why? I’d assume it’s different if it’s somebody else. And he pry would have won that race, but because of the past, Ty decided to make a move where he was going to rough him up to try to win the race himself. And I was just the person that took advantage of it, right? I was there. Right place, right time, and snuck around it.”
Earlier in the episode, Logano explained why he did not make a similar move on Christopher Bell to the one Carson Hocevar made on Ryan Blaney.
“It’s a very similar situation to the 12 and the 77. There’s two different ways you can play those cards. I had all the ability there to completely dump the 20 if I chose to. But again, it depends on who you’re racing. If that was somebody that I had a beef with, they’re getting backed in. ‘You had it coming,’ is what I would say. If you’re going to chop me like that, you’re exposing yourself, but I’ve never had an issue with Christopher Bell. We’ve always raced each other clean. We’ve always raced each other hard, but clean.”
“Was it an aggressive move on his part? Sure. Did I choose not to make an enemy on a situation like that? Yeah. I thought, ‘You know what? We probably need to live to race another day.’ It’s just thinking of that stuff in the moment. And it’s hard to do in the moment because you’re racing the heck out of each other for the win at Bristol,” Logano said.
“But at that time, you got to think big picture. And what is big picture? Winning the championship,” he elaborated. “That’s all I care about. And how do you do that? And there’s a lot that goes into that equation do it. It’s not just getting the best finish of that day. You got to think what makes you the best finishes of the next eight races, or seven races, or six races, whatever it is. How do I make sure that I get the most out of the rest of them and I don’t have someone gunning at me? That’s key.”
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