Rookie Joey Logano looking forward to third start at Texas

Posted Thursday, Nov. 05, 2009 Comments   (0) Print Share Share Reprints
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By JOEY LOGANO

Special to the Star-Telegram

On Thursday morning, Joey Logano, 19, the rookie driver of the No. 20 Home Depot Toyota, boarded a flight to D-FW. Once he landed, the young NASCAR star went to the GameStop headquarters in Grapevine and then headed to Texas Motor Speedway.

I’m here in Texas now. I flew in this morning and I went to the GameStop headquarters and was out there meeting with some of the executives.

You know, I’m driving the WWE SmackDown car in Saturday’s Nationwide Series race and Kyle Busch is driving the Raw car for the new video game, WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2010. GameStop sells video games and there’s a little partnership deal. I haven’t played the video game yet, but I’m going to. It looks like fun.

Hosting WWE Raw on Oct. 26 was a new experience for me. I never watched wrestling when I was a kid. It was interesting, though, and I was excited about how it happened and how it played out. It was pretty funny.

Kyle and I were joking about it because we were pretty nervous being in the ring. But it was pretty cool to go out there in the middle of the ring and say a couple words and have people go crazy. The fans were screaming and yelling, which was pretty neat. And I met a few of the wrestlers, too, and all of them were pretty cool.

I’m looking forward to racing in Texas for the third time. We should be better than we were in April. We’ve worked hard and we’re a lot better than what we were back then.

The track is one of the tougher race tracks to race, for some reason. It’s easy to lose your grip, but it’s a lot of fun to go around.

This week for me has just been focused on getting ready for Texas. I went to the shop and talked to the guys there and we’re just trying to get our race car faster. I watched some tape of myself racing in Texas and we’re going to try different things to make ourselves better.

I feel like we’ve gotten a lot better as the season has gone on. That’s what’s been motivating us and we can’t really reflect on how the season went until it’s over.

Getting my first win back in June was pretty neat. I think that gave us a lot of momentum for the team. That was a real cool point in the season.

For the rest of this season, we’ve really got to race every day and try to gain some momentum for next year.

I’ve gotten used to being a young star. All of my friends are doing something in racing and they know what I’m going through. I think that’s kind of cool because they treat me like a normal Joe.

Going into NASCAR at a real quick rate, it’s just the one thing I’ve always wanted to do my whole life.

— As told to correspondent Drew Davison

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