NASCAR faces many uncertainties ahead as Joey Logano steals another title in Phoenix finale

AVONDALE, Ariz. — Should we celebrate the end or feel relief that it’s over?

NASCAR’s 2024 season concluded at Phoenix Raceway this past weekend. Some moments from it were memorable and emotional and simply great. But there were also moments that just made you want to sigh and ponder the idea that you could have been spending your autumn weekend watching football on the television … or doing just about anything else.

Every season has its ups and downs, but this year, they felt a little more discernible. And this was personified throughout the three-day championship weekend.

The NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series

Remember how this series’ finale went last year? Yeah, I try not to remember, too. The 2024 edition perhaps wasn’t the most thrilling race that fans could have hoped to see, but here’s the thing: it was really the race this series needed.

Ty Majeski won the truck championship Friday night. He started from the pole, led 132 of 150 laps, and clinched his first NASCAR national series title with ThorSport Racing. Notably, this race wasn’t a never-ending fiasco with a dozen cautions that accounted for more than half the scheduled distance, 29 overtime laps, 12 trucks crashed out, and a race that took nearly two and a half hours to complete, like last year.

This race was clean and organic. Majeski and his ThorSport Ford were the fastest driver-machine combination in the field throughout the weekend. He was third in practice, first in qualifying, and most importantly, first on race day.

“I felt like we had a really good shot at winning this thing last night after practice,” Majeski said on Friday night. “Last night felt like a winner to me, and it certainly was; we were dominant tonight.”

Majeski is a talented racer. He’s a Wisconsin native who has twice won the State’s most famous late model short track race, the Slinger Nationals. He is also exceptionally skilled at iRacing, and many of its users consider him one of the best in the platform’s history.

His NASCAR career started rocky as his first opportunity on the national stage with Roush Fenway Racing in the Xfinity Series didn’t go well. He made 15 starts — most of which occurred in 2018 — and crashed out in five of them. He also never got a top five and only three top 10s in those starts.

In three years, he’s made himself at home with ThorSport. He had a solid 2024 season. Was he the most deserving champion? Probably not. Corey Heim and Christian Eckes, both of whom were fellow Championship 4 drivers, finished second and third to him in the race, respectively, and didn’t earn the title despite having more wins, top fives, top 10s, more laps led, and higher average finishes than Majeski.

A race without chaos and controversy on Friday night rejuvenated this series’ legitimacy because, for years, critics have said the series’ identity has become tarnished by fields full of deep-pocketed teenagers who don’t find value in respectfully racing their competitors. This thought peaked in 2023’s finale but was put to bed Friday when the race transpired without the type of follies seen last November.

The best race of the weekend was the Xfinity Series finale.

Justin Allgaier finally got the championship that had eluded him throughout his career. It wasn’t easy, as a mid-race meltdown and a timely caution had to happen for him to return to the front of the field, but he overcame it all. It was as dramatic and emotional as any NASCAR race in recent memory.

There was a point where he was deep in the field and two laps down. But it was a self-inflicted punishment because he failed to stay in line with the row of cars ahead of him before reaching the start-finish line on a restart and then sped on pit road when he tried to serve his penalty.

During a cycle of green-flag pit stops, he stayed out longer than most and put himself on the lead lap just as a caution came out for Anthony Alfredo’s crash in Turn 1. He had the fastest car all night, and once he got that lucky yellow, it was game on again.

Allgaier just completed his ninth season with JR Motorsports. In six of them, he was in the Championship 4 but didn’t get the title. A five-win season in 2018 wasn’t enough. A pole and a top-five finish in the 2020 finale were sufficient for a runner-up. A top-three finish last year wasn’t enough.

But he rallied to finish second in the race Saturday night. This time, he did enough to get that championship, and boy, the celebration certainly looked like one that was nearly a decade in the making.

He yelled so much that he lost his voice. His burnout was so long that entire chunks of rubber were ripped from the tires and scattered all over the frontstretch. He cried. His family cried. It was a moment for the ages for NASCAR.

His team co-owner, Dale Earnhardt Jr., was elated for him. Kelley Earnhardt Miller, his sister and team co-owner, walked into the media center and told the room they were in for a surprise. No more than 15 seconds later, Jr. runs into the room, clobbers the pole of Allgaier’s championship flag against the doorway, and jumps onto the stage — flag still in hand.

Jr.’s excitement for Allgaier was as grand as it could be.

“I probably will get in trouble for saying this. I didn’t give one shit about that Owner’s Championship,” he said. “I was like, I want my driver on that stage. That’s all that matters to me. Especially with Justin being in the middle of this, I want it for him.

“… I had no clue if we had won the owner’s [title]. It didn’t matter to me. I was so happy for Justin because he deserved it. He’s a champion. He’s good enough. Now he has it.”

It was a championship long overdue. The 2024 season was not Allgaier’s best statistically. There were other years when he was more deserving of it, not to say he wasn’t deserving this time around.

When Leonardo DiCaprio finally won his Oscar Award for Best Actor in 2016 for his performance in The Revenant, the floor gave him a standing ovation because it had been a long time coming for someone who had worked so hard yet always came up short against his competition.

It was a great film, but was it his most memorable one? Probably not. But that year, he was the best and finally got the hardware to prove it.

Allgaier’s competition acknowledged this type of sentiment. It was a popular win that other drivers felt compelled to congratulate him on and an emotionally satisfying triumph that everyone could feel.

The NASCAR Cup Series

What to make of Sunday is the question. Or better yet, what to make of the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season is the question. The Cup race didn’t have an atmosphere anything like Saturday. In fact, the Cup Series rarely had any positivity during its 10-week playoff run.

Bristol was a dud compared to the “happy accident” race in the spring when tires wore so fast that green flag runs lasted less than 30 miles. Talladega frustrated the Cup Series field because race control made inconsistent decisions about cars on the Damaged Vehicle Policy after a late 28-car wreck. Martinsville had a controversy about race manipulation being orchestrated by Chevrolet, resulting in Toyota driver Christopher Bell feeling “cheated” out of competing for the championship at Phoenix. And when Joey Logano won the race and title for a third time on Sunday, critics instantly clamored that NASCAR’s playoff format is not conducive to crowning a deserving victor.

Oh, and there’s a lawsuit between two teams and NASCAR happening right now, too, in case you haven’t heard.

The culmination of all these things makes for an overarching feeling of exhaustion. What can be done to make the racing consistently good? Is it a Next Gen car issue? Is it a Goodyear Tire issue? What about DVP? What changes might NASCAR make to it in the offseason?

How about race manipulation and OEM influence? Right now, drivers feel more inclined to keep their manufacturer happy instead of keeping NASCAR happy, so how can that be switched?

Is this championship format OK? NASCAR says the playoffs aren’t going anywhere, so what, if anything, might the sanctioning body do to convince skeptical fans that it’s the best way to mix entertainment with legitimacy?

And how might the charter lawsuit of 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports v. NASCAR change the future of stock car racing?

It’s a lot to digest, and it’s not a joyous time for the sport because there’s so much uncertainty. This isn’t your father’s NASCAR. Perhaps that’s why so many fans look back at the Winston Cup era with such positivity and a longing for what once was.

It’s human nature to feel nostalgia, and there’s a Mandela Effect when fans reminisce about the NASCAR of yesteryear. Has stock car racing ever been a problem-free sport? No, of course not. Has there always been politicking and manipulation? Sure. Have there been unavoidable changes to the rulebook throughout NASCAR’s history to keep things from getting out of control? Always has been and always will be. But still, it felt like simpler times when there weren’t playoffs. Or charter agreements. Or spec cars. Or convoluted policies in the rulebook.

Logano and Team Penske won the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series championship fair and square. And if you ask Logano or his crew chief Paul Wolfe, they would have no problem telling you that to your face.

“I’ve got a pretty sweet trophy right now. I’ll be laughing all the way to the bank,” Logano said.

“You can have a great regular season. It seeds you better for the playoffs. That doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to go all the way to the Super Bowl or, the Stanley Cup Finals or the NBA Finals. It doesn’t matter. It might help you,” he added. “… So for someone to say this isn’t real, it’s a bunch of bullshit in my opinion. That’s wrong. This is something that everyone knows the rules for when the season starts. We figured out how to do it the best and figured out how to win. It’s what our team has been able to do for the last three years. I don’t like people talking that way because if the rules were the old way, we would play it out differently, wouldn’t we?”

Wolfe expressed the same opinion.

“These are the rules we’re playing on right now, and we’ve done the best job with these rules,” he said. “It’s hard to compare because we would potentially approach the season differently if we were racing under a different format. I don’t know that it’s fair to say that we couldn’t win if we went back to the old format. That’s not how we planned out our season. We work on our season based on what the format is now.

“Were we fast in a lot of races this year? No. But we executed what the format is now, and that’s why we’re the champions.”

The State of the Sport

NASCAR itself sees it this way, too. During the State of the Sport address on Friday, NASCAR President Steve Phelps defended the playoffs and cited the method of determining champions in other sports as a reason why it is OK.

“We are not the only sport where the best statistical team does not get to the Final Four or the Super Bowl or the World Series,” he said.

Why is this acceptable? When did this become acceptable? And this question isn’t just for NASCAR; it’s for all of the country’s major sports leagues. The NBA and NHL allow half the league into the postseason. The NFL allows 14 of 32 teams to be included in theirs. And MLB, which had the most legitimacy for two decades in the 1990s and 2000s by only allowing its three division winners and one Wild Card team from each league into its postseason, now has 12 of 30 teams competing every October these days.

Sports is an entertainment business and the brass of each league has a duty to keep its fans interested, so there is that aspect to consider. But the point of having a regular season is to determine who is the best throughout the year and reward them with a chance at a championship without having more loops to jump through, though, isn’t it?

This writer is a New York Mets fan who felt some consolation as a sports purist when the team lost the National League Championship Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers a few weeks ago. The two No. 1 seeds from the National League and American League were the ones competing in the World Series, and that’s the way it should be.

The best of the best need to be winning titles. If having excessively long playoffs is necessary, then shorten the regular season. Otherwise, its value doesn’t match its length, i.e., MLB’s tremendously long 162-game season. Besides, a long regular season with a long postseason would just be oversaturation.

This is where NASCAR has gone wrong. Just because other sports leagues have expanded their playoff eligibility doesn’t make it right. Sure, Logano and the No. 22 team made the most of it, and great for them. Logano is a fantastic driver who still probably has another few titles in him before he calls it a career.

But was he the most deserving this year? That’s the debate. Maybe they did plan the season around their expectation to make the playoffs and intended to save their best for the final 10-race stretch. But why have a 26-race regular season if only the final 10 races matter that much? Playoff points and race stages in the first 26 events now appear not to be significant enough. It’s frustrating to think that, but it’s the truth. And that’s why NASCAR may have to tweak some rules once again this offseason.

If fans are as soured by NASCAR as they say they are, then they might need to move on with their lives. Or they can embrace NASCAR for what it is today. It isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. The lawsuit will eventually end. 2025 is a fresh start for every driver and every team. 2024 is finally over, and the sun will rise in another new season next February.

Is there uncertainty ahead in these next few months about the rules, the lawsuit, and everything else? Sure. You can say what you want about the current state of NASCAR. But as the offseason begins, you can be positive there is no shortage of intrigue about what happens next.