NASCAR is a sport where the rules are always seen as gray, regardless of how black and white they are. Bypassing established laws through clever trickery is a norm that has long been followed. So, it’s not a surprise that three-time Cup Series champion Joey Logano blatantly broke some rules back in the day when he was a young lad trying to make it in professional racing.
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He recently spoke to guest host Jelly Roll on Jimmy Kimmel Live about how he, along with his father, forged a birth certificate to compete in a racing series, which had an age requirement that he didn’t fulfill at the time as a ten-year-old. This was right about the time that he began racing in Legends cars. Using an inside man, he had planned to swap his original certificate with the fake one.
But, as it turned out, the inside man placed the fake one in his file, but never got around to taking the original out. Logano’s little act went on for a while until the rumor mill started spinning. He narrated, “So, the rumors started flying around. Like, ‘Hey, he’s not really 12. He’s only 10.’ I would just lie about it every time someone asked me. One day, someone looked in my file. Two birth certificates. No more fun.”
Logano then had to wait a few more years before continuing to trump opponents in that class, but he eventually got there. Roll humorously pointed out how this was a practice in stark contrast to Little League Baseball, in which 19-year-old bearded men act like they’re all seven.
Despite being caught and punished for the offense, Logano did not stop trying to ride the lines again. He tried the birth certificate trick in yet another series and got in an accident during one of the races. In the ambulance, the medical professional asked his age, and he gave a fake number.
That’s when his father knew that he wasn’t hurt in the wreck. Logano said, “They go, ‘How old are you?’ I go, ’15.’ My dad goes, ‘He’s fine.’ I was only 13. That was the moment he knew I was fine.”
Making it as a professional racer comes down to a deep hunger that is satisfied by nothing but remarkable achievement. The enthusiasm that Logano displayed in climbing through the ranks with a disregard for age can only be seen as an honorable wrongdoing at worst.
