Joey Logano’s entire Chase could have come unglued—literally.
During a race that saw rapid-fire cautions from the midpoint on, NASCAR allowed teams to get extra sets of tires from Goodyear for the late stages of the 500-mile event.
Only one problem. In Logano’s case, the glue that holds the lug nuts in place for the tire changer didn’t have a chance to set, and during a late pit stop, three lugs fell off, dropping Logano to the back of the field.
To make matters worse, as Logano tried to recover, contact from Marcos Ambrose’s Ford sent him spinning, causing the ninth caution of the race on Lap 309 of a scheduled 334. Logano restarted 26th, but a subsequent yellow on Lap 314 gave him a chance to recover significant track position by foregoing a pit stop.
Logano restarted seventh on Lap 318 and held 12th at the finish, salvaging a share of the Chase lead with one race left in the Eliminator Round.
“I don’t know what happened with the glue on the pit stop, and I haven’t gotten the full story yet, but we had a hell of a time trying to put rear tires on the car,” Logano said. “We lost all our track position with 30 (laps) to go, and I came off the corner and the 9 (Ambrose) hit me and popped my right rear (tire), and then we spun out.
“We put tires back on it and then just held on till the end and got something decent out of something that could have been way worse. I’m proud of everyone that kept their heads down and kept digging. That isn’t the way we wanted to do it, that is for sure…
“We put ourselves in a bad spot and got in an even worse spot and then dug ourselves halfway out of a hole there.”
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