Logano, 18, has shown that driving is kid stuff
RICHMOND - As with most people in his profession, Joey Logano's desire to become a racecar driver grew out of his affinity for playing with cars. The only difference was that his personal sandbox was the landfill of his family's former waste management business in Portland, Conn., where the cars and trucks he played with weren't die-cast toys.
"We had a 7,000-gallon water tanker that we'd used to water the yard with," says Tom Logano, Joey's father. "At 7, he couldn't push the clutch in, so we'd dump the clutch and put him in the seat and he'd just go driving around for an hour and then he'd step on the brake and kill [the engine] and we'd come get him. We'd take it to the sewer plant, fill it up with water again, and he'd keep going."
The landfill became Joey's personal proving ground, where he got comfortable behind the wheel of anything that would go, where he learned to operate vehicles such as a 7,000-gallon water tanker, and, more important, where he earned the trust and confidence of his parents. This, at a time when most kids Joey's age were just learning to shed their training wheels.
"I've driven a few things when I was little," says Joey, now 18, NASCAR's next star-in-the-making, from Middletown, Conn., who earned the nickname "Sliced Bread" as in "the greatest thing since . . . " from family friend Randy Lajoie for his meteoric ascent in the sport.
After sitting idle at Joe Gibbs Racing for the first five months of the year, Logano made his Nationwide Series debut May 31 in Dover, Del., and won his first Nationwide race June 14 in the Meijer 300 at Kentucky Speedway, becoming the youngest winner in series history, just 21 days past his 18th birthday. After his initial bid last weekend at Richmond was washed out by Tropical Storm Hanna, Logano will attempt to make his Sprint Cup debut Sunday in the Sylvania 300 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, where last year he became the first rookie in Camping World Series East history to win the championship.
Next year, Logano will slide into Tony Stewart's Cup ride at JGR and inherit not only his
"He's an amazing talent," says Wally Brown, a race engineer at JGR who has worked two years with Logano and will serve as crew chief of Logano's limited Cup effort this season. "Typically, the most impressive thing I've seen from him is how easily he gets up to speed. It doesn't matter if it's a Late Model or a Sprint Cup car. Heck, he's been racing since he's been 5 years old, so he has 13 years' experience."
Proving ground
But it wasn't until Joey was 7 that he finally convinced his mother, Deborah, he knew what he was doing behind the wheel. It was during a winter trip to Vermont with his mother and older sister, Danielle, now 20, which was nearly aborted until Joey came to his mother's rescue when she struggled to pull their Suburban out of their home's ice-bound garage."I had the Suburban backed in and all I had to do was go forward, but I couldn't even get out of the garage because the whole driveway was a sheet of ice," Deborah recalls. "So I tried shoveling, I tried sand, I tried the carpet, and I couldn't get out."
Exasperated, Deborah called Tom at work for help.
"He said, 'Let Joey get behind the wheel,' and I'm like, 'No way,' because Joey was like 7 and I wasn't going to let him show me up, so I said, 'No, I'm going to do this,' " Deborah says. "So I couldn't get out and finally I said, 'All right, Joey, get behind the wheel. Let's see what you can do.' He gets in there, and just puts it in drive and gets out of there like a piece of cake. Straight out, nice and slow, and all the way up the driveway."
From that point, Joey was off and running on a fast track of success, starting with the quarter midget ranks, where he won the first of three consecutive Eastern Grand National Championships in the Junior Stock (1997), Junior
"For me, I would go back to quarter midgets when he won his third Eastern Grand and every one was in a different series, a different car," says Deborah, asked when she was convinced of her son's talent. "I knew back then something was not right for him to be able to win three in a row in three different tracks. Something stood out then, but I don't think it really hit us 100 percent until he won the Pro Legends Series at 12."
That's when Logano's family moved to Atlanta in the hopes of promoting Danielle's ice skating career by opening a rink. But it was where Joey's racing career took off when at 12 he became not only the Pro Legends' youngest event winner, but series champion in 2002.
"That's when Mark Martin noticed him," Tom Logano says. "When he won that Pro Legends national championship, you knew that was really big."
Martin was so impressed with Logano, he exclaimed at the time, "I am high on Joey Logano because I am absolutely, 100 percent positive, without a doubt, that he can be one of the greatest that ever raced in NASCAR. I'm positive. There's no doubt in my mind."
"When you have someone experienced like Mark Martin speaking about him, then you say, 'OK, he must be a kid who's advanced for his age.' Then you say, 'OK, he's advanced past that stage,' " Tom says. "And us not having a racing background, we knew he was above average, we knew that, but how far above average, we really didn't know. When Mark started taking an interest, that's when it sunk in and we were like, 'Wow, a professional's really taken an interest.' "
Says Joey, "That was my big break. When I won my first Pro Cup race, my second race out when I was 15, that's when it set things off and people started looking at me more and I was able to back up Mark's words at that time. That's when it kind of stepped up."
Winning people over
Although he had discussions with Roush Fenway Racing and Ganassi Racing, Logano chose to sign a five-year development driver deal with JGR. That deal was reworked into a seven-year, multimillion-dollar Cup contract Aug. 25, when Logano was tabbed to replace Stewart in the No. 20."We had the opportunity at Joe Gibbs Racing to look at him and see what we could do," says Zipadelli. "What he did in the Camping World Series last year just kind of validated his maturity."
Logano last year won five times on the Camping World Series East circuit and recorded 10 top-10 finishes in 13 starts, becoming the first rookie to win the series title. But his most impressive win came in a combination event between the Camping World East and West Series at Iowa Speedway, where Logano beat Sprint Cup star Kevin Harvick, who the night before had won $1 million in the Sprint All-Star race at Lowe's Motor Speedway in Concord, N.C.
"I think a lot of people [last year] were saying, 'The reason he's running good is because he's in Joe Gibbs equipment,' " Joey says. "But when I was able to go out there and race Harvick hard for a long time, I think that said to everyone, 'Hey, maybe it's not just the equipment.' Don't get me wrong, I think equipment in racing is a big deal, and you've got to have it. It definitely helped change a lot of people's opinions."
Says his father, "We didn't expect he'd have a season like that. It was kind of a dream season, you know? For everything to click that well was phenomenal, and that kind of set the stage for getting him into the Nationwide car, but we'd never thought to the Cup car. Not this fast. So it's awesome."
But did the Loganos express any trepidation about watching their son grow up too fast and rise too soon?
"No, no, because he's proved himself to us," Deborah says. "And obviously, he's proved himself to a lot of professionals in this sport. So, yeah, I don't think it's gone too fast at all, racing-wise."
Especially not for a kid who grew up behind the wheel of a 7,000-gallon water tanker.
"It wasn't a big deal to me," Joey says. "Now I look back on it and I go to my parents, 'You guys must have been crazy to do that!' You stop and you don't realize what you were doing, you know, until you have a little 7-year-old kid come up to you and you turn to them and go, 'You let me drive when I was like that [young]? You guys were nuts!'
"But I think it's one of those things that made me who I am, made me the driver that I am, just because I loved cars when I was little, too." 