Joey Logano began his Cup career with Joe Gibbs Racing in 2008, but his breakthrough didn’t arrive until he moved to Team Penske five years later. Even so, he carried deep admiration for Joe Gibbs, enough that he supported the Washington Redskins simply because Gibbs had coached the franchise for 11 years. Logano, however, never considered himself a football person. His heart leaned toward hockey, a sport he played throughout his younger years.
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When the time came to choose between the rink and the racetrack, he picked horsepower over hockey sticks. Those early years were split between hockey practice and racing, and the imbalance in his schedule eventually caught up with him. Logano’s constant absence from practices and games forced him to walk away from the sport he once enjoyed.
As Logano had explained back in a 2009 interview with Frontstretch, “It was one or the other. I missed half my hockey games, and then my team started to not like me because I was never there. So I said screw it, I’m going racing. I felt like it was the better decision… I think it worked out pretty good (smiles). I was never going to be a Sidney Crosby or anything.”
In a 2014 interview, the driver of the No. 22 for Team Penske admitted he first tried racing at seven simply because he wasn’t good at anything else. In his words, he “sucked at everything else!”
During his childhood, Logano attempted baseball and quickly learned it wasn’t his calling. He described himself as really bad at it. Hockey remained fun, and he stayed in it long enough to be halfway decent, but it never felt like his true lane. Racing, on the other hand, struck a chord.
To see whether that early spark might lead somewhere, Logano‘s father bought him a quarter midget, although neither of them had any idea how the car actually worked, so they learned side by side. Together, they picked up the nuances, climbed the developmental ladder, and steadily built momentum. Before long, Logano’s natural ability behind the wheel became impossible to overlook.
There was no single moment that convinced him he belonged in professional racing. Instead, it was the entirety of the dream itself, pulling him forward step by step. He threw everything he had into the belief that one day he would become a professional driver. Fortunately, he carried enough fuel to turn that long-shot hope into a career that proved him right.
