The "Glove-Gate" saga has continued yet another week after Joey Logano was discovered to have worn an illegal glove while qualifying in Atlanta. NASCAR punished Logano for the infraction by having him start the Atlanta race from the rear of the field and serve a drive-through penalty during the race. NASCAR later fined Logano $10,000.
Logano spoke out Saturday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway about the webbed glove incident, saying it was "embarrassing" and he shares the responsibility of the penalty but also didn't admit who came up with the idea.
"That's kind of how a lot of things work," Logano said. "As a driver, you work with the team and hey, I'm going to take a portion of the responsibility of that, too, obviously. I should. I put the glove on. With that said, I didn't build the glove. I didn't make it on my own. I can't sew, so that's what it was, and we had conversations about it."
NASCAR says it does not know if Logano was wearing the glove at the Daytona 500 when we won the pole. Logan declined to comment when asked but also denied that wearing the glove made any real difference.
"It didn't do anything to speak of," Logano said. "It was directionally an area that everybody goes to try to block that hole. You see everyone put their hand there; we just tried to cover more space."
When rival driver Corey Lajoie was asked if he thought Logano had been wearing the glove during the Daytona 500, he replied with an empathic "yes" and said that Team Penske would have done computer simulation on the glove before using it on the track.
"It was hard to go through and embarrassing, for sure," Logano said. "But the fact [is] that we got through it and just move on and focus on the next week. We showed that we have some speed in our race car and to be able to put it on the pole here, to me, is a statement-type lap, so I'm proud of that."
NASCAR reporter Bob Pockrass at FoxSports gave props to Logano for trying something unique, "especially when they knew they had an in-car camera."
"But if NASCAR doesn't want to see more of this, it might have been better off penalizing him additional points to serve as a stronger deterrent," Pockrass continued.
Logano won his second pole in three races in Las Vegas, beating out last year's winner, Kyle Larson but Larson got the last laugh. Larson won the race, sweeping each of the two stages and taking the checkered flag, while Logano finished ninth.
