The Home Depot Team Notes of Interest

• Joey Logano will be making his third start in the Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway (DIS) on Sunday. The third-year driver of The Home Depot Toyota finished 20th in last year’s 500-mile event. Logano and the team had a taste of what the Daytona 500 would be like in The Shootout at Daytona last Saturday. With the two-car draft dominating the event, Logano and the No. 20 car drafted from the 22nd starting spot into the top five but were swept up in an incident on lap 27 and finished 18th.
• Logano has four point races under his belt at Daytona International Speedway. Following a 43rd-place finish in the Daytona 500 in his rookie season, the 20-year-old has finished 19th, 20th and 29th in the past three restrictor-plate races at DIS.
• The team will participate in the second Duel at Daytona on Thursday evening to determine its starting spot for the Daytona 500. Logano will start from the 15th position for the 60-lap qualifying race.
• The Home Depot Team and Logano look to build on their successes from the final third of the 2010 season. Logano and the team’s on-track performance in the closing races put them on par with the drivers that made the Chase for the Sprint Cup. Last season, Logano accumulated a total of seven top-five and 16 top-10 finishes, a vast increase from his 2009 rookie year.
• Meet Logano! Fans in the Daytona area can meet Logano at The Home Depot Store down the road from the track on Feb. 17 from 6 – 8 p.m. following the Duels at Daytona. The store is located at 2455 International Speedway Blvd. There will be photo opportunities with the No. 20 Home Depot Toyota and an autograph signing by Logano. Wristbands will be distributed starting at 5 p.m. to the first 700 fans.
• There are several new members on The Home Depot Team this season. Following the promotion of Jacob Canter to race engineer, the team hired Mike Lorusso as a second travel engineer. Todd Foster, a long-time employee at Joe Gibbs Racing and a former Home Depot Team member returns to the road crew as a mechanic this season. The over-the-wall crew added three new members to its six-man roster including gasman John Eicher, front tire carrier Brett Morrell and front tire changer John Royer.
• Welcome aboard The Home Depot associates from store #2509 from Bethesda, Md. The store number will draft along with Logano this weekend for the Daytona 500. Logano has been to Bethesda visiting the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the brave men and women of our military. The Walter Reed Health Care System provides comprehensive health care for more than 150,000 soldiers, other service members, family members and retirees in the National Capital Area. Its hub is Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the clinical center of gravity of American military medicine.
• The No. 20 Team is taking chassis #293 to DIS for the Great American Race. This is a new chassis in The Home Depot Team’s stable. The back-up car for the race is chassis #298, also a new chassis and served as a back-up last weekend.

Joey Logano Quotes on the Daytona 500:

“I learned a lot from The Shootout to use in the Daytona 500. I know I want to be around for the end of the race — that’s the big thing. The Home Depot Toyota was fast, I would have liked to see what we had for the end of the race. I learned a lot about this new two-car draft style. It’s a whole new game, trying to figure out how and where you should be pushing and what’s the best way and getting that chemistry worked out with other drivers. It was a good dress rehearsal for our pit road crew with the new fueling system and the fact that there are only six guys now. It helped our team prepare for the 500, but we just didn’t get the finish we wanted there. NASCAR implemented some changes for this week, so it will be interesting to see what the Duels will be like on Thursday too.”

“I think it’s fair to say we will be disappointed as a team if we don’t make the Chase this year. If you look at the first few races of last year, we were Chase caliber and sitting top-10 in points. Then summer came and we just self-destructed. That’s the part we have to work on this year. I do feel like it’s more realistic this year than it was last year to make the Chase. I feel like we can do that and we showed it at the end of last year that we can do this. I think all of us would be disappointed. We just need to be realistic about what we’re doing every weekend. It’s hard to look at the Chase — it’s so far down the road. I’m a race by race person and I say it all the time. I just focus on doing the best I can every weekend when I get to the race track.”

Joey Logano Daytona International Speedway Stats

Joey Logano Career NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Stats