RELATED: Dale Jr. 'Twitter burns' Logano
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Joey Logano laughs it off, and that's easy to do when you've just swept an entire round of the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.
Logano, driver of the No. 22 Team Penske Ford, hasn't lost a Sprint Cup Series race since last month when he finished 10th at Dover International Speedway. He followed that with a win at Charlotte. He won the following week at Kansas. And not only did he win at Talladega, but he also beat favored son Dale Earnhardt Jr. in the process.
Fans of the No. 88 were not pleased.
"I've gotten hate mail," Logano said Tuesday during media-day activities at the NASCAR Hall of Fame for the eight drivers advancing to the Eliminator Round. "Believe me, I got that part.
"I don't know why. It's OK. I somewhat enjoy it and I somewhat take it as a compliment because if you look at it, when I was getting beer cans thrown at me (after the Talladega win) ... I was sitting there driving and thinking about it. I was like, ‘Man, this is actually really cool.' "
"I get a kick out of it. If I post a picture on Instagram and then all the comments come up on my phone after I post something, the same thing on Twitter, but when the comments come up and it's like, 'You're a jerk.' And there are a lot of things I can't say right now, but I smile every time because I think it's kind of funny because some of them are pretty creative. I'm like, 'You put a lot of thought into that one. That's a new one.' I like the new ones. Those are good."
A quick scan of Logano's Instagram account confirms as much.
"I hate u."
"You got lucky dale would of had it."
"Is that before or after my beer can hit your car?"
"Too bad he didn't earn it if you actually watch it then jr was ahead at the time when they pulled the caution but go ahead and celebrate a (expletive) win because jr will always be a better racer than you will ever be"
"You suck @joeylogano. First you spinout kenseth when you already had a win and now you got lucky beating Jr. You got nothing from these wins. You should've just let Jr win."
Logano might spend time perusing the comments, but he said he doesn't worry about why people like him or why they don't. Four-time series champion Jeff Gordon had his share of detractors when he began beating NASCAR's established stars. Go back another generation and Darrell Waltrip did as well. It's common throughout the history of the sport as new stars begin to rise and icons begin to falter. And Logano is clearly on the rise. Sunday's victory at Talladega was his sixth of the season, tops for the series with four races remaining.
"I know there are a lot of 22 T-shirts out there and I really enjoy seeing that and I really appreciate the support that the 22 team gets, and if you don't like me, I don't care," he said.
"What I do like about our sport is our fans are passionate about their driver. They pick their team. They pick their driver and they say, 'This is my guy and he's right no matter what and everyone else is wrong no matter what,' and that's cool."
Logano will be going after a fourth consecutive win this weekend when the Eliminator Round gets underway Sunday with the Goody's Headache Relief Shot 500 at Martinsville Speedway (1:15 p.m. ET, NBCSN, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR).
There's been no time, he said, to enjoy what his team has already accomplished in this year's Chase.
"You win these races and you want to enjoy it and take it all in and have a great time, but you can't help but still look out the windshield and say, 'This is just a stepping stone to winning the championship,' " he said. "That's all that race is -- just another step to getting to the final goal and maybe at the end of the season we can take a step back and say, 'Man, winning the amount of races we did, the amount of top-fives, and the speed we had, that's something to be proud of.'
"But right now at this point, we can't stop. We've got to keep looking forward because we have not reached our goal yet."