New-look Kentucky should still result in same-old success for Logano – Nascar

MORE: NASCAR tweaks rules package for Kentucky

As a teenager thrown into NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series with the options of sink or swim, Joey Logano had few places of refuge.

Taking over the No. 20 Toyota of then two-time series champion Tony Stewart at Joe Gibbs Racing in 2009, Logano struggled under the weight of high expectations and a new series against much tougher competition.

But while his Sprint Cup education got off to a somewhat rocky start, it was success in NASCAR’s XFINITY Series that helped keep his confidence up and his progression steadily moving ahead.

And nowhere was that progression more evident than Kentucky Speedway, site of this weekend’s NASCAR triple-header featuring the Camping World Truck, XFINITY and Sprint Cup Series.

Logano, who currently has 25 career victories in the XFINITY Series, earned consecutive wins in 2008, ’09 and ’10 at the 1.5-mile track located in Sparta, Kentucky. His victory in the Meijer 300 in ’08, was his first in a NASCAR national series event.

“I tested here so much growing up,” said Logano, now 26 and competing fulltime for Team Penske in the Sprint Cup and on a partial schedule in the XFINITY Series.

“At Gibbs, this is where we came and tested six or seven times a year; it was a lot. So when I came here in an XFINITY Series car, it was like BOOM! I know this race track. I know what it takes to go fast and we won.”

NASCAR eliminated private team testing prior to the start of the 2015 season. Today, the only on-track time allowed other than race weekends are Goodyear tire tests and a handful of organizational tests.

The additional track time provided a wealth of benefits for Logano. No less important, though, was the overall competitiveness of the Joe Gibbs Racing XFINITY Series program at that time. JGR entries won 49 of 105 XFINITY Series races during the three-year span of ’08-10.

“The cars over there then, like they are now, were dominant,” Logano said. “They were so fast. You just jump in them and win.

“So as a rookie, we would go to race tracks and know exactly what I needed at this track to be able to go out there and win.”

Logano made the move to Team Penske in 2013 and immediately earned his first top-10 championship points finish in the Sprint Cup Series. He has three top-10 results in three outings at Kentucky with Penske, including a runner-up finish last season.

Fourth in points, Logano has finished fifth or higher in his last four Sprint Cup Series starts, including a fourth-place result in Saturday night’s Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway.

Teams will be attempting to solve the riddle of not only an entirely new racing surface at Kentucky when Saturday’s Quaker State 400 Presented by Advance Auto Parts (7:30 p.m. ET, NBCSN, PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) gets underway, but a new track configuration as well.

In addition to the repave, workers also re-configured Turns 1 and 2 of the track, increasing the banking from 14 to 17 degrees during an extensive off-season upgrade.

The pit exit lane has also been widened from 14 feet to 30 feet and the width of the racing surface in Turns 1 and 2 has shrunk from 74 feet to 56 feet.

RELATED: Teams come to new-look Kentucky for test

Fourteen Sprint Cup teams tested on the new configuration June 13-14. Logano’s No. 22 Ford team, headed up by crew chief Todd Gordon, was among those logging laps and gathering data.

“It’s a different place now,” Logano noted. “But it’s still Kentucky; it still has the same trends.”