April 20, 2009
By Matthew Pizzolato
Matthew Pizzolato
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After being touted all of last season as the best thing since sliced bread, Joey Logano has been a little stale this season, at least in the Cup series. Stepping into Tony Stewart’s shoes at Joe Gibbs Racing would not be easy for anyone, and Logano has quite a large pair of shoes to fill.
Perhaps Logano was pushed along too soon, before he was allowed to develop. Last week’s win at Nashville was only his second win in 24 races in the Nationwide Series. He passed Kyle Busch with nine laps to go and held him off to win his first race of the season.
Despite his success in the Nationwide Series, he has struggled so far this year in Cup. There are several factors that could be contributing to this, not the least of which are the huge differences in driving the Nationwide car and the Car of Tomorrow that is used in the Cup series.
He won his very first Nationwide race last year and was expected to be the next NASCAR prodigy. But the expectations were simply set too high. Logano is after all, human like the rest of us.
His lack of results at the Cup level have shocked even him. Before this weekend’s race, he currently sits at 35th place in the standings and hasn’t finished better than the 13th place he posted at Las Vegas in the Shelby 427. Could his poor finishes have resulted in a lack of confidence? Maybe winning in the Nationwide series is just what he needed to get back on track.
“It's big for me, an awesome confidence booster for sure. I'm looking at it and saying, ‘Hey, I can do this; I am here for a reason; I can win races,’” Logano was quoted as saying in a Joe Menzer article for nascar.com. “That's big, just to reassure yourself of that. I'm sure this is just going to keep carrying on and now we just have to build on this momentum and keep going.”
Carrying forward this success into the Cup series is what he needs to focus on for the remainder of the season. While no one expected Logano to be the next Tony Stewart right out of the gate, no one expected him to be performing this poorly either. His average finish after seven races is 30th.
Still, beating Kyle Busch in a Nationwide race shows that Logano is a talented driver, he just needs a little time to become comfortable driving NASCAR’s tank, also known as the Car of Tomorrow.
"Kyle Busch is pretty good these days. To come in [to Nashville] and just out-race him was really something," Dave Rogers, Logano’s crew chief in the Nationwide series, said in the Menzer article. “It was driver versus driver on the race track and I'm sure there are plenty of days where Kyle is going to get the best of Joey, but [Saturday] Joey got the best of him. I think he's really that good."
Such high praise for the younger comes as no surprise. After all, Logano is only 18 years old. Many of the tracks on the NASCAR tour, he has never raced at before. Give him a year or so to get a little experience under his belt, then it will be seen as to whether or not he can live up to all the hype.
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