JOEY LOGANO – No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion – “Who won the Daytona 500? (Laughter).” HOW DOES IT FEEL TO WIN THE DAYTONA 500? “About as cool as I thought it would feel. I think as a kid any young racer dreams of winning the Daytona 500. It’s the biggest race we have all year and you’re down here for two weeks and there’s just so much build-up coming up to this race and with the qualifying and the Duels you get out there, it’s the first time you’re racing in a couple months, so there’s a lot of anxiety and a lot of nerves before the race. To be able to pull that car into Victory Lane and see my team there and see my family and my friends. Everyone was here, so it couldn’t be any better. It’s an amazing feeling. I can’t really put it into words. It’s something you can’t describe. I keep re-living over and over again what it was like down the back straightaway when I came off of turn two and I was looking in the mirror. I saw them crashing and I’m like, ‘OK, keep my foot in it here,’ and you hope there’s a caution but I think even not they weren’t close enough to really be able to make a run. You have a split-second after the caution came out and you think about it and you’re like, ‘Did we win?’ And then it’s straight chaos after that. It’s an amazing feeling. I’m fortunate to get to race for Roger and Shell and Pennzoil and Todd Gordon over here. He’s a fricking man. I’m just the lucky guy that drives this thing.”
IN 2007 YOU LED ONLY FOUR LAPS AND PASSED MARK MARTIN TO WIN THE RACE. HOW IS THIS RACE DIFFERENT FROM ALL THE OTHER RACES THAT, THAT HAPPENS SO MUCH?
“There are a lot of things that usually happen during SpeedWeeks and I think as you get into the race today, this is very typical. You go through a whole week and then you show-up on Sunday and the weather is 30 degrees hotter than it has been at any point that we’ve practiced in; or it’s colder or there is some kind of scenario or there’s something going on or a rules change. There’s always something to manage. But I think when you look at that year; we’d actually had some trouble there toward the end of the race. And everything just has to line-up for you. The first thing you have to do is finish, so you have to have luck on your side today. If it’s your day, it’s your day. And if it’s not, you’re going to wind-up on a tow truck. We’ve been on both sides of that. This is just kind of it’s own beast. There’s a lot of hype. There’s a lot of work and effort that goes into this one particular race to lead off the season. Everybody has had all winter to prepare for it.
“You have to try to control your emotions at the beginning of this race because you’re more amped-up for this race than you are for probably any race you’re going to go to all year; and just try to minimize the mistakes because there are a lot of ‘firsts’. The guys have jumped over the wall, but they’ve really only jumped over the wall one time and there’s not been all the cars on pit road and all the cars together on the race track, so you don’t really know what you have with your race car until you drop the green flag and all 43 cars are out there together. There are a lot of unknowns still as we go into the day with a complete drastic set of circumstances, weather-wise, that are much different than we’ve practiced or raced in all week.” (more…)
