Joey Logano said he doesn’t care about Baseball Hall of Famer Chipper Jones’ criticism of him for a radio rant about teammate Austin Cindric during last weekend’s race at Talladega, asking “has Chipper Jones ever driven a race car at Talladega?”
Logano made the comment Tuesday on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio’s “The Morning Drive.” Logano also said on the show that he and Cindric have talked and “we moved on.”
Logano was racing Bubba Wallace to win the second stage last weekend at Talladega. Cindric was behind Wallace in the top lane. Logano led the inside lane.
Wallace won the stage. Afterward, Logano unleashed an expletive-filled rant on his team’s radio about Cindric, saying: “Way to go Austin. Way to go. You dumb (expletive). Way to (expletive) go. What a stupid (expletive). He just gave it to him. Gave Toyota a stage win. Nice job. Way to go. What the (expletive).”
Jones, the former Atlanta Braves player who was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2018 and served as an honorary official for the 2018 Daytona 500, stated on X: “Congrats to @AustinCindric on his @TALLADEGA win. Good teammates are hard to come by, Boss! Remember that one of urs MFed u on national tv, when in all actuality, u did everything possible to keep from wrecking him. Hate to be #dueces in the ‘team’ meeting on Monday. Some people are ‘hooray for our team as long as I’m the star’ as every team has them. Hendrick, RCR, JGR, Penske, etc. Sometimes karma is glorious. Enjoy this one! In case anyone is confused, lemme be clear….@joeylogano”
Jones also posted on X Logano’s post-race interview from Fox and wrote: “Couldn’t even congratulate @AustinCindric in the post race! #teamplayer At least he mentioned being selfish in the interview. Credit!”
Asked Tuesday on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio about Jones’ comments on social media, Logano said he was unaware of them. Once told of them, Logano said: “Has Chipper Jones ever driven a race car at Talladega? That would be my first question. I’m pretty certain he hasn’t.
“That’s like me saying something about baseball. I know nothing about baseball. That’s like me saying something that he did something in baseball that was wrong. That doesn’t matter.
“You care about what people say, their opinion, if you really know them and they know you and they understand the scenario and the situation. Everyone is going to have their opinion on how they see things from the outside.
“No one else, nobody, Chipper Jones, no race fans, nobody is in the room when we come up with how we’re going to race at superspeedways except the drivers, the team principals at Penske and the crew chiefs. That is it. That’s the only opinions that matter. The only ones.
“So everyone can go off and talk about whatever they want. They don’t know the situation. They don’t know everything that goes into it, so it doesn’t matter what they say, and that’s probably why I never saw (Jones’ comments on social media) or really care about it after you tell me right now. Chipper Jones, he seems like a cool dude, he’s done a lot, right? He’s a pretty popular, good baseball player, but he’s not a race car driver, and I know he wasn’t in the room with us when we set in place the way things are supposed to go.
“You would think somebody that has been in professional sports and has been in meetings like that would probably take a step back and say, ‘Man, there’s probably more to the story here than what there is.’ I’m surprised it went that way. Maybe he was just bored. I don’t know what his situation is. I tell you I don’t care.”
Logano also explained his frustration on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio with Cindric’s role in Wallace’s stage win.
“You go superspeedway racing, there’s different rules in place for the teams,” Logano said. “There’s the (manufacturer) rules, there’s the team rules and you try to put these all in place to try to give your cars the best chance to win. Everyone knows superspeedways you’ve got to work together. … The rules that were set in place weren’t followed. That ticked me off quite a bit because I feel like I’ve always done the right thing and try really hard to do that.
“The rules have been put in place because of things we have done wrong in the past. You don’t want to make the same mistakes over and over again. It wasn’t the first offense kind of situation. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and, yeah, I lit up pretty quickly because I care. I am into racing, I am in 100%, and I expect things to go a certain way. When they don’t, yeah, I get pissed off.
“Austin and I talked about it. We’ve got to move forward. That’s what it is. I explained my side. He understood. We move on. That’s pretty much all there is to it. There’s no sense in airing our dirty laundry and airing out what the actual rules are because that’s private information that doesn’t need to be out to everybody. But the facts are that what we set in place wasn’t happening and that’s why I got frustrated. Like I said, we talked about it and we moved on.”
“Should I have hit the (radio) button and probably spouted off so much? Probably not. Probably not. Probably blew up into a little bigger situation than it needed to, but the conversation, either way, needed to happen. Just more people are talking about it now.”
Cindric explained his point of view of what happened at the end of the second stage after winning last weekend’s race.
“I felt like I kind of just got pinched and was trying not to wreck the cars in front of me, including Joey,” Cindric said after his third career Cup win. “So, it was a messy end to the stage and I feel like between myself and (Josh Berry) and Joey probably could have done better, because I do feel we let one slip there.
“I can understand his frustration without kind of seeing the whole picture, but yeah, those are the type of things that when you’re expecting someone to have your best interest, those are the challenges. We have a lot of meetings centered around that, and I feel like it’s a constant, requires constant maintenance. It’s not always pretty and the conversations aren’t always easy, but I do feel like as a team we do it better than most.”
