Joey Logano after Darlington: We just set ourselves back too far

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Joey Logano had to settle for 4th place at Darlington. He believes that he could have done much more, but there were certain problems. “It’s a solid day but a missed opportunity is probably where I would put it," said Logano for motorsport.com "With so many others having trouble, every time you come to the Southern 500, especially in the playoffs, you’ve just got to survive and you get a solid finish.

That’s what we were able to do, finish fourth after so many teams had issues." This race was one of the toughest. It was a big challenge for Logano who, despite his experience, failed in certain things. "We had plenty of our own issues, too," he added.

"We gave up track position a couple times and then we got caught with that caution and lost track position fairly late in the race, and then we just battled hard. It’s really hard to come up through the field here. It’s really hard to pass and was able to kind of battle back and get a top five out of it, which is OK."

Joey Logano on the next races

He emphasized again how much he wanted to win on this track.

"I mean, you’ve got to be happy about it because we scored a lot of points and that’s what it’s all about here in the first round, but also a missed opportunity to win the Southern 500 and I really want that one," he said.

"That one stings a little bit because I think we were better than the cars in front of us if we had the air. If we were able to stay towards the front we could tune to cleaner air, instead of going in the back and trying to tune to dirty air.

We just set ourselves back too far”. Erik Jones is the winner of the race. He surprised many with his maturity and readiness. “Well, I mean, I never lost any belief in myself through any of it. I knew I could still do it, and I just knew we needed to grow the program to do it, and we have.

We’ve brought on a lot of great people in the last year. Dave Elenz called a great race today. His first Cup win—that’s pretty cool for him,” says Erik Jones.