Team Penske’s Joey Logano wins the 2015 Daytona 500

Joey Logano is a Daytona 500 champion!

A week before one of Roger Penske’ Shell-branded race cars looks to take out one of Australia’s biggest motorsports events, one of Roger Penske’s Shell-branded race cars has won one of America’s biggest motorsports events.

This afternoon on the high banks of Daytona International Speedway, the fifty-seventh running of NASCAR’s biggest event, the prestigious Daytona 500 – otherwise known as the Great American Race – was won by Team Penske’s Joey Logano, marking the heavyweight team’s second Daytona 500 triumph.

Penske’s bright yellow #22 Ford, driven by the just-married Logano, of Connecticut, which isn’t exactly a stock-car racing hotbed, took the chequered flag ahead of defending NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion Kevin Harvick and two-time, defending Daytona 500 winner Dale Earnhardt as a huge wreck broke out on the final lap of a race that had already gone over the scheduled 200-lap distance, and into a green-white-checker finish.

Once the white flag had been waved, the next flag would end the race, and it was the yellows that waved first, as a melee broke out behind the lead pack, encapsulating pole sitter Jeff Gordon, a three-time Daytona 500 champion, who will retire from the sport at the end of the gruelling Sprint Cup Series season in November.

Logano’s win was something of a redemption story for a guy who debuted in the Sprint Cup Series with Joe Gibbs Racing when he was just eighteen, and nicknamed “Sliced Bread” as in, he was going to be the best thing since sliced bread. Strapped into one of the sports’ best rides, Logano was supposed to be a superstar immediately.

Four years later, an underwhelming stint at Joe Gibbs Racing was over and many wondered if perhaps Logano would ever have a successful Sprint Cup Series career. Apparently Roger Penske, as shrewd a judge of talent as there is in motorsports, didn’t have any concerns, because he hired Logano to fill the vacant #22 car. Penske says he never hesitated in hiring Logano.

The #22 team really gelled last year, winning five races, and now, Logano has paid back Penske’s faith in spades, winning a Daytona 500 crown. Not that we ever doubted it, but Penske’s legacy is even richer now. Logano’s win in NASCAR’s biggest event is Penske’s second, and it sits nicely alongside  record-setting Indianapolis 500 victories, a handful of IndyCar championships, a Sprint Cup Series championship, last year’s NASCAR development Xfinity Series championship and a few sports car wins, including the famed 12 Hours of Sebring.

As for Logano, perhaps this will be the season where he breaks through and wins a
Sprint Cup Series championship. That’s the progression, to go from a consistent race winner at the highest tier of the sport to a championship contender. He showed plenty of speed last year, and, many forget that, at just twenty four years of age, he’s still got the bulk of his career ahead of him. He’s getting faster and smarter, and Penske’s equipment has elevated the team to the head of the Sprint Cup Series field. All the things you need to have a legitimate shot at the gruelling championship. Logano has shown that he isn’t afraid to mix things up on the track, either – he isn’t the most popular driver, thanks to a few incidents that’ve seen him earn the ire of fellow drivers – and that, when a championship is on the line, can be a help rather than a hindrance.

Logano, who grew up wanting to race with Jeff Gordon – who led the most laps, but was caught up in the late-race accident – at Daytona, led home all comers, including some of the sport’s icons.  He showed maturity that we haven’t often seen. They say marriage steadies a man, and Logano, in his first race since tying the knot, slyly quipped that if he’d known this was the result, he might’ve gotten married sooner.

After a Daytona Speedweeks that put NASCAR in the headlines for all the wrong reasons – a domestic violence case involving Kurt Busch and a terrible crash by his brother in Saturday’s Xfinity Series Race that could’ve been involved had the track installed some form of protection, the ‘safer barrier’ or good old fashioned tyre bundles – it was a relief to talk about racing for a change.

Unfortunately, the 2015 edition of the Great American Race was anticlimactic. This despite a ferocious pace over the last fifty miles that fell by the wayside when Justin Allgaier’s stricken brought out the race’s final caution, pushing it to a green-white-checker finish. As the field came down the backstreet, cars three and four wide, going for the win at Daytona, Austin Dillon made contact with Gordon, and it was a chain reaction event from there.

Cars went every which way mid-pack as the leaders charged back to the line. Then, yellow flag, and the race was over. What a shame, because the finish, with Harvick, Earnhardt Junior and Jimmie Johnson lurking behind Logano and looking to pounce late, might well have been legendary.

For Joey Logano, it will still be a legendary day. No matter that he’d scarcely led all day, and Ford had shown themselves to be far weaker than Toyota and Chevrolet, but a little luck and a propensity to put himself in the right place delivered Logano his maiden Daytona 500 crown. And the way the guy is driving, I get the feeling it won’t be his last.