There’s a large, blown-up photo on the walls of the New Hampshire Motor Speedway media center. In it, Joey Logano stands beaming, confetti at his feet, onlookers and teammates celebrating his September 2014 victory.
Logano sat Friday in the media center, looking at that photo, his smile matching the one from that afternoon two years ago.
“That, in my mind, is the biggest win of my career,” the Connecticut native said. “Larger than (the) Daytona (500). … It took me a very long time to understand how to go fast around this place, and to kind of conquer your toughest race track, which happens to be your home race track, was a very special day.”
He could be poised to add another today. Logano enters the New Hampshire 301 as part of Team Penske’s dynamic duo, as he and Brad Keselowski have helped turn the Ford-based team into the Sprint Cup’s meanest fleet.
Penske has three of the last four wins, with Keselowski coming off of back-to-back victories and Logano winning two races before that in Michigan. Logano’s No. 22 Pennzoil Ford has become one of the surest bets in the field, rebounding from a pair of crashes in May to post four straight top-fives (including the win) before a crash last week in Kentucky snapped the streak.
It’s a formula for a big Sunday afternoon at Loudon. But Logano isn’t ready to let up, or acknowledge any job as finished.
“We have to start building that confidence and momentum up and build faster race cars,” he said. “I talk about finding another gear when we go to the Chase. We need to find a ninth cylinder here in a few weeks that we don’t believe is there right now, but we have to find a way to find it.”>kern<
He’s at the right track to keep the hot stretch going. Logano’s turned into a Magic Mile machine, with an apparent reservation for the front of the pack. He followed up that 2014 win with fourth- and third-place finishes last year, and he’s set himself up for success at the Cup’s most significant track position venue by qualifying in the top 10 six straight times – a streak he extended by nailing down the sixth spot for today.
“I don’t feel like it is our best race track,” he said, “but we have made huge progress.”
It’s mirrored the progress he has made in his career. It gets harder and harder to believe that Logano, a championship contender and Chase for the Sprint Cup qualifier each year since joining Penske in 2013, was once an underachiever with Joe Gibbs Racing, a prodigy who was promoted to the Cup level amid massive hype at 19 and never finished higher than 16th in the standings in four Gibbs seasons.
He won only twice in that stretch, and the first actually came at Loudon – a rain-shortened victory in June 2009. But just as those years are hard to reflect on fondly for Logano, so is that career milestone.
“The first one, it is what it is,” he said. “It is in the record books, so I take it, but it wasn’t the way … any driver really wants to get them.”
Logano strongly prefers the second one – the one that came during the Penske stretch that has revitalized his career. Logano won once his first year with his new team, then erupted into a force that took five wins in 2014 and six last year, including the Daytona 500.
He’s kept it up this season, with a fifth-place spot in the standings and a hand in turning Penske into the juggernaut du jour. But Logano knows from experience that even these kinds of highs can be fleeting.
“It’s a constant struggle every week, right?” he said. “You can never stay stagnant and say ‘Okay, this worked last time, so we’re going to do it again,’ because it’s not going to work again. Everyone has gotten better since the last time you were on a race track.
“There’s got to be constant improvement, and the only way you have constant improvement is you’ve got to try new things.”
It’s a snapshot look at the competitive attitude that has fueled Logano and his team. Top-fives and top-10s aren’t good enough unless they’re wins. Wins aren’t good enough unless they can be repeated.>kern<
“This week, I’m personally trying some new things because I feel like we’ve been stuck here in a fifth-place car,” Logano said. “Which isn’t bad, but we want to win. And this race is going to be a Chase race when we come back.”
The demands are high, but Logano likes the way his No. 22 team is moving toward reaching them – and if he needed to be convinced, he can look around at the other Cup drivers who are trying to figure out what Penske’s cars are doing.
“I think we have recently found some speed in our race cars. Really, ever since Charlotte (in May),” he said. “I feel like we’ve been making some progress, comparatively, to the field. I think it’s a good time for it.”
There lies the balance between appreciating what a team has done and striving for what it still could do, one Logano and his crew have been as good at striking as any.
“There are always ways to improve, and if you stop doing that you are going to get passed before you know it,” he said. “We are constantly looking to find something new, but we still keep a log book on what we did (well).”
(Drew Bonifant can be reached at 369-3340, abonifant@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @dbonifant.)