Cameron Bebeau

After a season that stretched 39 weeks, Joey Logano won the season finale race and was crowned the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series champion. 
 
Logano previously won the title in 2018 and 2022, making him one of six drivers ever to win three championships at the top echelon of NASCAR, and one of ten to win more than two titles. 
 
Christopher Bell led the most laps all day with 143, followed by Joey Logano’s 107 laps led of the 312 laps ran. 
 
The race was red flagged (halted for cleaning up track conditions) for less than 10 minutes after an accident involving the pace car. According to MSN, while leading the field to green to start the second stage, the pace car appeared to wait too long before ducking onto pit road, leading it to plow the sand barrels located on the pit wall.  
 
Logano’s championship has brought many protests, as he has underperformed all season to win under this format. As a comparison, Logano had an average finish of 17.1, while fellow Championship 4 contender William Byron had an average finish of 12.9. Purely off this metric, Logano finished in the bottom half of the field as often as he didn’t.  
 
While this is a good metric, the narrative is furthered when it’s considered that he finished in the top five 7 times and the top ten 13 times, compared to that same competitor’s tally of 13 and 21 top five and top ten finishes, respectively. In the championship, you must be perfect, and many people argue that a sub-15^th place team should not hoist the trophy. 
 
This championship is Team Penske’s third consecutive title, becoming the first team to win three championships in a row since Hendrick Motorsports’s historic five consecutive titles from 2006-2010.  
 
Team Penske teammate Ryan Blaney finished the season second place in points, followed by Hendrick Motorsports’s Byron in third and 23XI Racing’s Tyler Reddick in fourth.  
 
Further information is available on the NASCAR website.  

Photo courtesy of Caitlyn Wilson on Unsplash.

Originally Published at: https://www.fsuthevoice.com/joey-logano-wins-nascar-cup-championship/