It is extremely common in NASCAR to hear stories from drivers about how they’ve always known that they wanted to compete in professional motorsports. Many would say that they got into go-karts as kids and never got out. But this wasn’t the case for the three-time Cup Series champion, Joey Logano.
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He said in a 2014 interview that he tried out racing as a seven-year-old only because he wasn’t good at anything else. He laughed, “I sucked at everything else! I tried baseball. I wasn’t very good at that. It was really bad. I’ll rephrase it. It was really bad. I played hockey for a while, and I enjoyed that. I was halfway decent at it. But I really enjoyed racing.”
To see if his interest in race cars would go someplace, his father bought him a quarter midget. Neither well-versed in how the car operated, they learned the tricks of the trade together from there on. They slowly began climbing the ladder and before long, the extraordinary talent that young Logano had became apparent.
He won his maiden Eastern Grand National Championship in the Junior Stock Division in 1997. Thereafter, he won the Junior Honda Championship the following year and established himself as a quick and rising star. It may have taken some time for Logano to figure out what he was good at, but once he did, there was no stopping him.
When did Logano know he could make it as a professional race car driver
Continuing the interview, the host asked him if he had a particular moment that gave him a strong reason to trust his abilities behind the wheel. Logano answered that it wasn’t any particular moment but his entire dream, holistically, that pushed him further towards becoming a professional racer.
He said, “I never really had that [particular moment] because that was when I was little. I had that childhood dream of being a race car driver. It just stayed like that. It never changed. It was always like that.” He banked his entire life on the hope that he would make it as a professional and fortunately, he had enough fuel in him to make it happen.
The Team Penske superstar continued to balance the scales by noting that having a backup plan is the smart way to go about things and reiterated that he wouldn’t recommend the approach that he took to others.
