NASCAR insiders react to legendary Joey Logano radio rant at Talladega

Austin Cindric was victorious during the NASCAR Cup Series race at Talladega on Sunday. However, his Team Penske teammate in Joey Logano was not very happy with him during the race, and that continued after the checkered flag waved.

The reigning Cup Series champion ripped Cindric after Bubba Wallace won the second stage of the race in Alabama. He was angry at his teammate for slowing up, which killed his speed coming to the start-finish line. 

“Way to go Austin, way to go, you dumb f***!” Logano said, via Jeff Gluck of The Athletic. “Way to f***ing go. What a stupid s**t. You just gave it to him. Gave a Toyota a stage win. Nice job. Way to go. What a dumbass. Put that in the book again.”

In the time afterwards, NASCAR insiders Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic discussed the matter on the latest episode of their podcast, The Teardown. Evidently, Gluck is siding with Cindric, believing he made the right decision for himself at the time.

“I think, once cooler heads prevail, I would suspect that maybe, once Joey gets that explanation, he would probably be more chill about that,” Gluck explained. “Because Cindric wasn’t like, ‘I’m going to bail on you here,’ like Logano probably thought. It was, ‘I’m just trying to not turn you into the wall and wreck the whole field,’ which again, good decision. So, I think I’m team Cindric on that one.”

Meanwhile, Bianchi simply chalked it up to super-speedway racing. Sometimes unlikely allies prevail, and you can’t always push your teammates to the wins, or stage points, in this case. He’s not faulting Cindric either.

“I asked Joey Logano about this post race and he’s like, ‘Austin made a bad decision.’ I didn’t go back and forth on it, but he’s like, ‘Austin made a bad decision,’ and Joey did not want to go further into it. I would be curious to see, like you go back and look at the tape and the set of circumstances, sequence of events, you might have a different view. But this is the weird thing about super-speedway racing,” Bianchi added.

“Kyle Larson is pushing a Ford driver today to the win. This is just part of it. It wasn’t too long ago in the playoffs where I think it was Kyle Larson, if I’m not mistaken, was told not to push a certain driver to a win, because they were a different manufacturer.

“So, it’s just this whole game of how this all works, where you’ve got these different camps. But sometimes you get guys like Carson Hocevar, who pretends he’s a Toyota and is pitting with a Toyota and ends up leading the Toyotas onto pit road in that sequence there, which is just absolutely wild. So, it’s just a strange bedfellows. But that’s super-speedway racing now.”

All told, Joey Logano tried to show some support for Austin Cindric after the race, but the damage might already be done. There might have to be some mediating done at the next Team Penske meeting, even after the No. 2 car returned to Victory Lane on Sunday afternoon.