Like every Cup Series driver, Joey Logano has weathered highs and lows, but through it all, one constant remained: his hard-nosed racing style delivered with that trademark smile. Yet, early in his career, one misstep nearly convinced him he’d never sit behind the wheel of a race car again.
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In a recent appearance on the Whiskey Riff Raff podcast with Quinn and Shelby, Logano revisited one of the most mortifying incidents of his early racing days. He was just 14 or 15 at the time, cutting his teeth in the Pro Cup Series and nearing a potential deal with Roush Racing. During a routine pit stop practice session at Roush’s facility, things went south when he wrecked their newly built car.
Logano said, “They just got done building this new car, and I would drive the car… I didn’t have my driver’s license, so someone would always drive me down there. So, I get in this brand new car, a brand new pit stop car. Everyone’s really excited about it. And I go to drive into this pit stall, and I push the clutch in, and I didn’t have driving shoes on.”
What followed was a perfect storm of rookie error and panic. Logano continued, “So my foot kind of falls off the clutch pedal and gets wedged behind the brake pedal, and then the clutch on the top of the other foot, and it gets stuck in there, and I panicked…
“And I go straight through the pit stall, and there’s like a bunch of tires in front of it. I just go way up over the tires into the fence as the fence goes. Knocked the radiator right out of this car. Crush it.”
At that moment, Logano thought he had torpedoed his shot before it even began. He remembered thinking, “‘That’s the end of my career. I’m done.’… All the guys are looking at this car like, ‘What did you do? Just got done building this thing.'”
But that crash turned out to be a mere bump in the road. By 2007, Logano had already entered the Busch East Series and the K&N Pro Series West while driving for Joe Gibbs Racing. Winning races in both tours, he quickly rose through the ranks.
By the following year, Logano had already made his mark across all three national NASCAR series, Truck, Xfinity, and Cup, starting a career that would eventually count him among the sport’s most successful drivers. That wreck didn’t end his career — it just gave him a crash course in perseverance.
