Royal Purple 300 - Results

Another Top-10 Finish for the No. 20 GameStop Racing Team and Joey Logano at Auto Club Speedway

Coming into Saturday’s Royal Purple 300 at Auto Club Speedway, Joey Logano had a love-affair with the two-mile track. After the day he had though, Logano might be reconsidering his feelings for the Southern California oval. Logano had an up-and-down, eventful day at Auto Club Speedway, seeing his No. 20 GameStop Toyota run as high as fourth and as low as 38th en route to seventh-place finish in the fifth NASCAR Nationwide Series event of the season.

Logano started the day by qualifying the GameStop Toyota in the fourth position. However, it didn’t take long for things to start going downhill for the Joe Gibbs Racing team. Logano complained the car was hitting the splitter and making the car extremely tight. The team elected to come in and pit on an early caution to elevate the problem. When they did, they noticed that Logano had hit a large piece of metal that impaled the front of the No. 20 Toyota, causing a large hole to form just below the grill area.

It took the team multiple pit stops to fix the problem, putting Logano back to 38th position on the ensuing restart. It didn’t take Logano long to make his way through the field though, picking off cars left and right, getting back into the top-20 just 15 laps later and breaking back into the top-10 by lap 65.

However, the problems didn’t stop there for Logano. The No. 20 GameStop Toyota was extremely tight and Logano struggled to make up positions. Crew chief Adam Stevens made multiple adjustments to the car all afternoon long, with air pressure, track bar and wedge adjustments on nearly every stop. Twice, the team took “big swings” to get the car back in the ballpark.

By the end of the 150-lap, 300-mile event, Logano and the GameStop team had the car handling the best it had all afternoon long. Logano ran as high as fifth late in the event. However, the team still struggled to find speed in the Toyota and slowly slipped back through the field, eventually settling for seventh when the checkers waved.

Joey Logano Thoughts:
“It sucks to be disappointed with a top-10 finish, but we are today. Honestly, we are kind of baffled with where the speed is in the No. 20 GameStop Toyota. We had the car handling the best it had all weekend there at the end of the race, but we just didn’t have the speed in the car that we needed to. And at a track like this, you need to have that speed. Without it, you are just going to be riding around the track.

“I am not sure what happened early in the race when we hit that piece of metal. I never saw a thing on the track and I didn’t feel it. I was really surprised when the guys said to come back in because we had a hole in the front of the car. I guess it was a pretty big piece of aluminum or metal that had went right through the front of the car. From there on out, we were chasing the car and the track. We were fighting to get back to the front rather than fighting to run with the leaders. There at the end of the race, we had the car handling the best we had all race long. But the speed wasn’t there. I don’t know what we’ve got to do to make it better, but we will soon enough I’m sure. We just need to get the speed there and we’ll start winning some races.”

Adam Stevens Quotes:
“It was a frustrating day. We were behind the eight-ball from about 10 laps into the race and we had to play catch up all afternoon long. I thought the No. 20 team did a great job of getting the car better and making the adjustments and having fast pit stops, but when you put yourself in a hole that big, there is nothing you can do about it. The worst part about it is that it wasn’t of our doing. We hit that debris that put a hole in the nose and we were playing catch-up when we should have been running with the leaders. We fought tight, tight, tight all day after that and finally got the car good there at the end. But this is a track-position and aero-sensitive track, so getting that far back really put us behind.

“I’m really proud of the effort the team put forth this weekend, but we’ve got some improvements we need to make. This is a race-winning caliber team with a race-winning caliber of driver. We just need to put it all together and get this No. 20 GameStop Toyota into Victory Lane. We’ll get that, I can promise our fans and supporters.”

What’s Next:
The No. 20 GameStop Toyota will have a weekend off before returning to the track in two weeks at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, Texas for the O'Reilly Auto Parts 300 on April 8th.

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