Joey Logano made no apologies or retractions in his first comments Friday on the Pocono incident with Kevin Harvick.
Joey Logano Defends Actions, Post-Pocono ‘Firesuit’ Comments
“I don’t take nothing back,” Logano said calmly. “I’m a man of my word. I said what I had to, and that’s it.”
Harvick and Logano made contact going for the same line late in the Pocono race, and Logano angrily tried to confront the older driver afterward.
Later, in comments to reporters, he suggested Harvick was simply doing what wife DeLana, who “wears the firesuit in the family,” ordered him to do.
But Logano stood by those words, saying, “I was mad.”
“I felt like I had a top-five finish going and when something gets taken away from you like that, it wipes the smile off your face,” Logano said. “I just wanted to express to him how I felt about it.
"(It was) heat of the moment and a lot of things are going on, and that's the emotions that came out of me."
Logano was asked a couple of times about his father, Tom, who burst into the scene and ordered his son to wade into a mob of Harvick's crewmen to stand up for himself.
Some fans and observers criticized the elder Logano for fighting his son's battles, but the driver said he was comfortable with the situation.
“He’s fine,” Logano said. “You know, my father, I love him to death and he’s there for me. That’s really cool and a lot of people don’t have that. He’s someone who has been by my side my whole life.
“Maybe it was a position where he shouldn’t have been there, but he’s a father and I’ll bet 99 percent of the fathers would have been there anyway.”
Logano said he knew he “surprised a lot of people” by displaying his emotions, but said repeated incidents with Harvick led him to decide “enough’s enough.”
“After two or three (incidents), you’ve kind of had enough of that,” Logano said.
Asked about Harvick’s comments that he couldn’t talk to Logano because of the younger driver’s age, Logano scoffed.
“Well, I am young,” Logano said, “but I’ve been racing a long time. It’s harder for me to talk to him than it is for him to talk to me. I was trying to, but no one (on Harvick’s crew) would let me get to him. I was the one trying to talk to him.”
Logano said he had no idea why Harvick had a beef with him in the first place, and said he’d been asking himself that question all week.
When it’s the final laps of the race, Logano said, “Why would you roll over and die? You’ve got to have that fire in your eye.”
“When it comes down to the end of the race, you should be able to race,” he said. “That’s what this is. This is NASCAR. This is racing.”
And of the T-shirts that DeLana Harvick began selling that say “I wear the firesuit in this family,” Logano said he saw the humor.
“It’s kind of agreeing with what I said, so I think it’s kind of funny,” he said.
Logano said several times he wanted to put Pocono behind him so he could focus on making the Chase, but when asked if it was over between he and Harvick, Logano was non-committal.
“You never know,” he said. “I’m not going to say it is, I’m not going to say it’s not.”
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