NASCAR’s annual swing through Loudon is always a special weekend for Joey Logano.
The Middletown, Conn., native attended races here as a kid, and it was only a handful of years later that Logano began turning laps around this track as a driver.
His popularity in the region reached a new height when he won his first Cup series race right here in 2009. The win also made Logano, 19 years old at the time, the youngest Cup driver to reach Victory Lane at any track. That record still stands.
This weekend, Logano rolls into New Hampshire Motor Speedway as the defending champion in NASCAR’s Monster Energy Cup Series and the points leader in this season’s standings.
“It’s cool to come home for the first time … since we won the championship,” Logano said Friday. “I’m looking forward to Sunday because it’s always a fun race for us, but especially just because of the support my team and I get here.
“I always say I feel like Dale Jr. here because there’s so much 22 gear and a lot of New England race fans that are rooting for their hometown guy, so that’s a pretty special and neat feeling.”
Logano turned in a qualifying lap of 135.893 mph Friday night and will start Sunday’s Foxwoods Resort & Casino 301 (3 p.m., NBCSN) from the fourth row.
There were three drivers dominating the sport at this time last season, and Logano was not one of them, though he was right behind them at No. 4.
Martin Truex Jr., Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch came into this weekend in 2018 with 14 wins between them. Dubbed the “Big 3,” it was believed the season championship would be decided between these three drivers.
That destiny prevailed by the time NASCAR pulled into Homestead-Miami for the championship race in November. Sixteen drivers qualify for the playoffs, which begin in September, and is cut down to four by the final race in Miami. Truex, Harvick and Busch all made it, and Logano qualified as well thanks to a win at Martinsville three weeks prior.
Logano, whose No. 22 Penske team was rebounding from a 2017 campaign where they failed to qualify for the chase, showed unwavering confidence heading into the title race.
He told the media he was the favorite to win, and then told a crew member as he climbed into his car, “I’m getting in as a driver and getting out as a champion.”
Logano kept his word, passing the 2017 champion Truex for the lead in the closing laps. He drove away to the checkered flag, leading Truex, Harvick and Busch across the finish line in tandem.
Of course Logano, who turned 29 in May, spent part of the offseason celebrating the championship, but the NASCAR offseason is a short one. Three months after winning at Homestead, Logano and his fellow Cup pilots kicked off a new season at Daytona.
Even with a championship on his resume in the top stock-car racing body in the world, Logano still feels like he is chasing a title like it’ll be his first.
“It doesn’t matter if we won or not last year, our goal is the same,” he said. “We’re in a better spot this year than we were at this point last year. We’ve got more speed in our cars. We’ve got more playoff points and more wins … overall the speed is there and I think that’s a key thing to think about right now, so we’ve got to continue that into the playoffs and have the run that we did last year.”
Logano leads a contingent of four drivers from New England running in Sunday’s race, along with Ryan Preece, also from Connecticut, who is in his first full-time season in the Cup series driving the No. 47 Chevy for JTG Daugherty Racing. Andy Seuss of Hampstead and Austin Theriault of Maine are running in their first Cup series event. It is the first time since the 2000 season that four drivers from New England are competing in the same Cup race.
Although he hasn’t had a chance to speak with Suess or Theriault this weekend, Logano said he is happy to see more New England drivers get an opportunity to run in NASCAR’s top series. It’s evidence, he said, that the auto racing community is still strong in the northeast.
“It’s cool to see the New England guys get into this more and more,” he said.
And he’s not just talking about drivers.
“You look at the race teams out here and there are a lot of crew guys that are from up here that come from modified racing or just racing up in this area,” he said. “The majority of my team is from around here, not too far, and that’s a lot of fun for us to be a part of.”
Logano’s career and championship season were celebrated Friday night at a dinner at the North East Motorsports Museum. The museum, located on the south end of the track’s property off Route 106, opened in 2017 and highlights the regions racing roots, from stock cars to motorcycles.
“I think Dick Berggren’s museum out there, the North East Motorsports Museum, really shows how present motorsports is in the New England area,” he said. “It’s special to be a part of that heritage.”
(Nick Stoico can be reached at 369-3321, nstoico@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @NickStoico.)