NASCAR: Joey Logano goes from first on Saturday to last on Sunday at Watkins Glen

Joey Logano beat everyone to the checkered flag on Saturday at Watkins Glen, but his Sunday was one he’d already like to forget.

NASCAR is a sport that generally doesn’t let you stay too high for too long. For Joey Logano at Watkins Glen, he didn’t even get to enjoy his latest triumph for 24 hours before suffering serious disappointment.

Logano won the Zippo 200 on Saturday, holding on to the lead until his Team Penske teammate Brad Keselowski made a mistake and allowed Logano to cruise to victory. Surely, that would mean a solid finish on Sunday too, right?

Nope. Try dead last.

It was only lap 2 when Logano encountered trouble, failing to make a turn and smashing up one of the front corners of his No. 22 Shell Pennzoil Ford. That incident sent Logano to the garage, and shortly thereafter, word came in from NASCAR that his day was done.

The problem was that NASCAR ruled Logano’s contact with the wall was caused by contact with another car. That meant if he went to the garage to fix the damage, he was out of the race, something that seemed to catch both driver and team off-guard — particularly since replays showed that a bump from AJ Allmendinger damaged Logano’s radiator but it was debatable whether it caused him to run off the track.

“I don’t really know what happened in the garage on how the whole repair situation is,” Logano said after being released from the infield care center. “I don’t know. It’s somewhat confusing, I think, to all of us to try to understand exactly how that works, so I don’t really know what happened there.”

Logano’s misfortune was just a sample of a wilder than normal start at Watkins Glen that also featured Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Kyle Busch and Denny Hamlin racing each other very hard right from the drop of the green flag.The driver of the 22 at least got to sample some of those good times, even if it was for less than two laps.

“It was fun,” Logano said. “I was trying to keep the nose on the car and was gonna try to make a run on [Kyle] Larson off the carousel and I was right on him when they checked up in front of him. He lifted and there was nothing he was supposed to do.”