Joey Logano had the fastest car he’s driven all season. It didn’t matter. His day ended not on the banking at Texas Motor Speedway but on pit lane, where a chain-reaction pileup during a two-tire circus turned his Discount Tire Mustang into junk.
The sequence during Sunday’s Würth 400 second stage unfolded like a demolition derby in a parking garage. Cars were diving in for quick two-tire stops, and the compressed timing turned pit road into a game of high-speed chicken. Cole Custer’s No. 41 Chevrolet stopped abruptly when Ty Gibbs’ No. 54 shot out of its stall directly in front of him.
Logano, already rolling hot off his own stop further up the lane, had nowhere to go. His left front buried itself into the back of Custer’s car. Seconds earlier, he had already dodged one bullet, narrowly missing William Byron’s spinning No. 24 Chevrolet.
“He just checked up in front of me, stopped, and you’re trying to look and try to get up out of the way, and it just stopped,” Logano told Fox Sports. “There was nothing I could do.”
The frustration in his voice was unmistakable, not because of what happened but because of what he was losing. Logano said his Mustang was among the best cars on track during long runs at the end of the stage. “Speed capable of going up there,” he said. “Which makes it hurt even more, to be honest with you.”
He wasn’t the only one bitten by Texas. Christopher Bell’s race ended even more violently. Bell was leading when Todd Gilliland’s No. 34 hit the wall ahead of the leaders and ricocheted down the track directly into Bell’s No. 20 JGR Toyota.
Kyle Larson nearly added his name to the casualty list when Chase Briscoe left his pit box early and almost collected the No. 5 Chevrolet coming in a stall ahead. Larson eventually retired anyway, joining Ty Gibbs and Chad Finchum on the DNF list.
Custer’s team, to their credit, bolted the No. 41 back together well enough to rejoin in the final stage and scavenge a few positions from the growing list of retirements. Small consolation for a Haas Factory Team entry that got rear-ended through no real fault of its own.
The root cause of the pit lane mess wasn’t any single driver’s mistake. It was the two-tire gamble itself. When the entire field takes two tires, pit stops compress to a handful of seconds and cars stack up on the lane like rush-hour traffic on the LBJ Freeway.
Drivers leaving stalls can’t see what’s coming. Drivers entering the lane can’t stop in time. The geometry of pit road at Texas, tight and fast, doesn’t forgive hesitation or surprise braking.
Logano’s 2026 season has been a slog. He admitted as much on camera. “It’s been a tough year, Jamie, to say the least.”
Finding genuine speed at Texas should have been a turning point. Instead, it’s another entry in a growing file of what-ifs. The car was there, the result wasn’t, and all the speed in the world means nothing when pit road turns into a pinball machine.
“All you can do is keep digging,” Logano said. He’s right. But at some point, a team that keeps digging out of holes never gets to race from the front. That’s the cruelest part of a season like this one.
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