At Bristol, Logano seeks to continue late charge - MotorSportsTalk

After last week’s win at Michigan, Joey Logano is in the thick of the Wild Card battle going into tonight’s Irwin Tools Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway. Logano is 17 points behind 10th-place Greg Biffle and just seven behind Martin Truex Jr., who currently holds the second and final Wild Card spot in the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

With only three races left in the regular season, Logano is still walking on the proverbial tightrope as one bad race spells the end of his shot to make the Chase in his first season with Penske Racing. But he’s naturally bullish about Bristol following his critical victory one week ago.

“These are three very, very important races,” said Logano on Friday at BMS. “Our goal is to get in there by points right now, whether that’s by wins or whatever.

“I think if you have two wins, you’re pretty confident you’re gonna be in it, so if we can get that [second] win, it would be huge. If not, we’ll have some points we’ve got to make up, but this team can do it. I’m very confident coming into this weekend, for sure.”

But while Logano appears to be surging at the right time, one can’t help but figure that he, as well as teammate Brad Keselowski, would have less pressure to deal with this weekend if not for the penalties they suffered following the April race at Texas Motor Speedway.

Leading up to that event, the rear-end housings and other parts from both Logano and Keselowski’s cars were confiscated in pre-race inspections.

Both drivers wound up each taking a 25-point hit in the driver’s standings for those violations, and the lost points could really be used right about now; Keselowski, unlike Logano, is in the Top 10 of the Sprint Cup standings but has no wins and is only four points ahead of Biffle.

However, Logano knows what’s done is done and even though he admits that he and his team think about the Texas penalty, he knows he has to keep pushing.

“If we didn’t have a couple of tire failures, we wouldn’t be in this position we are right now, either,” he said. “We’d be in [the Top 10] pretty good, so, yes, it is part of our season, it is one of the things that makes it interesting…The only thing you can do about it is go out there and work hard and make it up, which I feel like we can do.”

Logano will roll off sixth tonight in “Thunder Valley.”

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INDIANAPOLIS — The first Indy 500 victory for Josef Newgarden also was the richest in race history from a record 2023 purse of just more than $17 million.

The two-time NTT IndyCar Series champion, who continued his celebration Monday morning at Indianapolis Motor Speedway earned $3.666 million for winning the 107th running of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.

The purse and winner’s share both are the largest in the history of the Indianapolis 500.

It’s the second consecutive year that the Indy 500 purse set a record after the 2022 Indy 500 became the first to crack the $16 million mark (nearly doubling the 2021 purse that offered a purse of $8,854,565 after a crowd limited to 135,000 because of the COVID-19 pandemic).

The average payout for IndyCar drivers was $500,600 (exceeding last year’s average of $485,000).

Indianapolis Motor Speedway owner Roger Penske, whose team also fields Newgarden’s No. 2 Dallara-Chevrolet, had made raising purses a priority since buying the track in 2020. But Penske but was unable to post big money purses until the race returned to full capacity grandstands last year.

The largest Indy 500 purse before this year was $14.4 million for the 2008 Indy 500 won by Scott Dixon (whose share was $2,988,065). Ericsson’s haul made him the second Indy 500 winner to top $3 million (2009 winner Helio Castroneves won $3,048,005.

Runner-up Marcus Ericsson won $1.043 million after falling short by 0.0974 seconds in the fourth-closest finish in Indy 500 history.

The 107th Indy 500 drew a crowd of at least 330,000 that was the largest since the sellout for the 100th running in 2016, and the second-largest in more than two decades, according to track officials.

“This is the greatest race in the world, and it was an especially monumental Month of May featuring packed grandstands and intense on-track action,” Penske Entertainment president and CEO Mark Miles said in a release. “Now, we have the best end card possible for the 107th Running of the Indianapolis 500: a record-breaking purse for the history books.”

Benjamin Pedersen was named the Indy 500 rookie of the year, earning a $50,000 bonus.

The race’s purse is determined through contingency and special awards from IMS and IndyCar. The awards were presented Monday night in the annual Indy 500 Victory Celebration at the JW Marriott in downtown Indianapolis.

The payouts for the 107th Indy 500:

1. Josef Newgarden, $3,666,000
2. Marcus Ericsson, $1,043,000
3. Santino Ferrucci, $481,800
4. Alex Palou, $801,500
5. Alexander Rossi, $574,000
6. Scott Dixon, $582,000
7. Takuma Sato, $217,300
8. Conor Daly, $512,000
9. Colton Herta, $506,500
10. Rinus VeeKay, $556,500
11. Ryan Hunter‐Reay, $145,500
12. Callum Ilott, $495,500
13. Devlin DeFrancesco, $482,000
14. Scott McLaughlin, $485,000
15. Helio Castroneves, $481,500
16. Tony Kanaan, $105,000
17. Marco Andretti, $102,000
18. Jack Harvey, $472,000
19. Christian Lundgaard, $467,500
20. Ed Carpenter, $102,000
21. Benjamin Pedersen (R), $215,300
22. Graham Rahal, $565,500*
23. Will Power, $488,000
24. Pato O’Ward, $516,500
25. Simon Pagenaud, $465,500
26. Agustín Canapino (R), $156,300
27. Felix Rosenqvist, $278,300
28. Kyle Kirkwood, $465,500
29. David Malukas, $462,000
30. Romain Grosjean, $462,000
31. Sting Ray Robb (R), $463,000
32. RC Enerson (R), $103,000
33. Katherine Legge, $102,000

*–Broken down between two teams, $460,000 Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, $105,500 Dreyer & Reinbold Racing/Cusick Motorsports