Joe Gibbs Racing's Joey Logano seems pleased with rookie NASCAR Cup season

By Jared Turner - Associate Editor

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Joe Gibbs Racing driver Joey Logano (left) and crew chief Greg Zipadelli gained ground in their first season of NASCAR Sprint Cup competition.

LaDon George
NASCAR Scene

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Related stories: Joey Logano wraps up rookie award at Homestead

Joey Logano’s rookie season in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series wasn’t always pretty. In fact, it was sometimes downright ugly. Despite dealing with his share of setbacks along the way, Logano weathered the storm for a solid rookie campaign.

While 2009 wasn’t spectacular, it was respectable, given his lack of seat time and relative inexperience.

After all, he’s still just 19 years old. He was 18 when Joe Gibbs Racing named him the successor to two-time champion Tony Stewart in the organization’s No. 20 Toyota.

Did Logano - who finished 20th in the standings, won one race and captured honors as Raybestos Rookie of the Year - live up to his expectations?

“I didn’t have any coming into this year,” he says. “The only thing I wanted to do was get rookie of the year, and for the rest of it, I wasn’t sure what we were going to have. I wasn’t sure how we were going to be, and after the first eight, nine races, it makes you wonder, ‘Oh boy, am I going to be all right here?’ I didn’t set any big goals, just keep improving, keep getting better. And I’ve never done it my whole career, I’ve never really set huge goals.”

Logano did set out to finish races, and he accomplished that by being around at the end of 33 of 36 events. Team owner Joe Gibbs calls Logano, “not a mistake guy.”

“He kind of earned his way with the drivers – you’ve got to do that,” Gibbs says. “The [veterans] are looking at you kind of like, ‘Hey, what’s this guy going to be like? Can I race next to him?’ I don’t think we could have asked much more for this year. … In almost every race, if you watch what happened, he actually at the end of the race was always probably stronger than he was at the beginning, and then at the end of the season, I think he was much stronger than what he was at the beginning.”

Logano indeed seemed to get better with time. After failing to net a top-10 in eight starts, the Middletown, Conn., native finished ninth at Talladega in April and matched that outcome two weeks later Darlington Raceway - a track notoriously unkind to first-timers. Logano backed that up with another ninth-place finish the following weekend at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.

Suddenly, talks that JGR had possibly elevated him to NASCAR’s top series too quickly began to fade.

“Was I in over my head? Probably a little bit to start. But I think everybody is when you first get in one of these cars,” says Logano, who won five races in a part-time Nationwide schedule for JGR while driving the old car. “They’re so different, and there’s no other way of getting experience in them. You’re going to be in over your head for a while until you get it figured out.

“I don’t care if you’re 19 or you’re 28. It’s not going to come easy because there’s nothing else like it.”

Gibbs feared that Logano’s learning curve might be exacerbated by NASCAR’s testing ban at all Sprint Cup, Nationwide, Truck, East and West tracks in 2009.

Entering the season with just three Cup starts and a partial Nationwide schedule under his belt, the testing moratorium figured to be a disadvantage for Logano. His three previous Cup starts represented his only in-race seat time in the current-model Cup car.

“We thought we were going to get to test the whole offseason, and all of a sudden within five weeks after we made that decision, NASCAR said ‘No testing,’” Gibbs said. “And so we were totally taken back by that. And the rookies, they didn’t get extra tires; they got nothing. They didn’t get extra time on the track or anything. So here you’ve got an 18-year-old going to race tracks he has never been to and racing in a car he’d never been in.

“I would say that where he is today, for us to wind up 20th in the points, to have been fortunate enough to win that race up in Loudon (New Hampshire Motor Speedway) and to see him progress the way he did, we wouldn’t have probably dreamed that we were going to be able to do that.”

Logano finished the season with three top-fives and seven top-10s but struggled with inconsistency. The last of his three DNFs came after a spectacular crash in the fall race at Dover, where his car flipped several times before landing on all four wheels. He was uninjured.

Logano’s best finish was the win at New Hampshire in June after a call by crew chief Greg Zipadelli to stay on the track as rain moved in. The rain did come just a few minutes later with Logano having inherited the lead when others pitted. He became NASCAR’s youngest Cup winner at 19 years, one month and four days.

Logano considers the win a highlight of his season but is even more proud of his steady gains.

“In the beginning of the season we were running like crap, but I feel like we’ve made improvements, and I think that’s the high point,” he says. “We’ve gotten better throughout the season. We still have a ways to go but I feel like I, as a driver, have come a long way and me and Zippy (Zipadelli) working together has come a long way. So I say that’s the high point is that you can come out of a hole that was really, really deep and start digging your way out of it and keep getting closer to the top.”

Zipadelli, who guided Stewart to both of his championships at JGR, admits it wasn’t always easy coaching the rookie driver.

“Some days, I think it’s hard for him to understand what we’re telling him and the importance of it just because he hasn’t lived it, you know?” he says. “And then afterwards, he’ll say, ‘Yeah, I should have listened to you’ or ‘What you said made sense’ but you’ve got to learn for yourself sometimes things to actually understand why things are important, you know?

“It’s like telling your child to not touch the stove because it’s hot. They don’t know what hot is until they touch it and they burn their finger.”

Is Logano now ready to challenge for a berth in NASCAR’s Chase For The Sprint Cup in 2010? Team President J.D. Gibbs believes he could.

“We’d be disappointed if he didn’t have a good shot at doing that,” he says.