Logano's rapid ascent a sign of changing times

Jeff Burton was 21 years old in 1988 when he broke into NASCAR's national divisions in a Busch car owned by his father. More than five years passed before he got his first shot in a Cup car, a one-off for a Fil Martocci-owned team that had never before competed at that level. It wasn't until 1996 -- eight years after breaking into NASCAR's big leagues -- that he finally landed a ride capable of winning races and contending for a championship, which happened when he first slid into the No. 99 owned by Jack Roush.

Teen scene

The task facing Joey Logano is simple: perform up to elite standards on and off the track.

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Burton was 29 by then, and had worked for the better part of a decade to climb the career ladder and secure a seat with one of the elite organizations in Cup racing. Compare that to the rapid ascent of Joey Logano, who at 18 has locked up a ride with a Joe Gibbs Racing team that's won three titles at NASCAR's highest level -- all before he's even made his first Sprint Cup start.

But Burton -- who wasn't part of any development program, and drove for the Stavola Brothers before getting his big break with Roush -- wouldn't have done it any other way.

"The way that I did it, I think, was better than the way it's done today," he said. "Me having time to grow up as a racecar driver, but more importantly as a person, I think was better than throwing a kid 19, 20 years old into this. I'm not saying it's wrong doing that, I just think it served me personally fine to do it the way I did it.

"I thought running the Nationwide Series allowed me a chance to mature. I ran it full-time for like four or five years and that was a great experience. I learned a lot. It enabled me to mature and made me a better racecar driver. It made me a more mature person before I moved up into this. Then when I moved up into this, I drove for a team that really didn't expect to win. They were very happy running 15th, 20th was a good day. It's a whole other criteria that I was doing compared to what they're doing today. To me I think the way I did it was in some ways better. In other ways it was harder, but it allowed me to grow and get a better understanding of what goes on here."

But the days when a driver has four or five years to find his footing, or can take satisfaction in a 20th-place finish, seem to be ending. No question, Logano is a special talent; he's been heralded by Mark Martin as the next great thing since he was in middle school, and backed it up on the racetrack. But he's also the product of a system that puts hopeful drivers behind the wheel when they're still tots, sees teenaged up-and-comers inked by elite organizations, puts college-aged drivers in the kind of equipment their forebears could only have dreamed of at that age, and expects them to win immediately.

There are others -- 20-year-old Ricky Stenhouse Jr., 18-year-old Marc Davis, 18-year-old James Buescher and 17-year-old Trevor Bayne, to name a few -- vying to follow the same path as Logano. Without ever turning a wheel in a Sprint Cup race, the Joe Gibbs Racing phenom was picked to succeed two-time champion Tony Stewart in the organization's No. 20 car. He's slated to make his Sprint Cup debut next week in Richmond, and follow with five more events in the car owned by Gibbs affiliate Hall of Fame Racing (read more). It all makes the drivers once known as the sport's "young guns" look old by comparison.

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"I had no business driving stock cars at that age. I was lucky to do it at that age. I didn't drive go-karts and Legends cars and all those little things when I was a kid. I didn't really start racing full-time, full-sized cars until I was 16 or 17, and I shared my ride with my brother every other week," said Dale Earnhardt Jr., who first raced ay the Cup level in 1999, at what then seemed a youthful 24 years of age.

"We weren't winning and I didn't know what the future held for me. I felt lucky to get in and be able to keep a job and afford to live the way that I do. It's exciting to see these young guys come in. So much talent at such a young age. I remember how I was at 18. I didn't have the mentality and the [maturity] to handle all the things that they'll face in the garage in and outside the car. I think that's really where the owners and the mentors can be most careful, is how this guy is affected by the attention outside the car. I wish Joey and those guys the best, because they're coming up and hopefully they'll have a lot of respect for the guys that have been here for a while, and we'll all have a lot of fun out there racing and have some good close, hard racing."

Of course, Logano has unshakable credentials. He became the youngest winner in NASCAR national series history in June when, at 18 years and 21 days old, he reached Victory Lane in a Nationwide race at Kentucky Speedway. He's also been Gibbs' primary test driver, logging some three dozen days behind the wheel of the new Sprint Cup car, gathering valuable information for teammates Stewart, Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch.

But the No. 20 car? At age 18? "Times change," said Matt Kenseth, who broke into Sprint Cup at what now seems the ripe old age of 26. "It's a lot different now than it was, obviously, with the younger drivers coming in. You used to have to kind of prove yourself through the short tracks and do all that stuff, and it's not that drivers don't prove themselves now, but people start racing at 5 years old now. When I started racing, most people started at 16. Some kids were doing go-karts, I guess, but all big-bodied stock-car stuff up in Wisconsin, you couldn't drive them until you had a driver's license, so you couldn't really start any younger. I think that's a big reason for it, the kids can get experience a lot sooner than we used to be able to."

Those "young guns" sure don't seem too young anymore. Ryan Newman began Cup racing at age 22. Kasey Kahne was 24, Jimmie Johnson 25. Even Jeff Gordon, the driver whose success first convinced car owners that young drivers could compete and win, was 20 when he made that historic first Cup start at Atlanta Motor Speedway in late 1992. Perhaps the only real parallel to Logano is Busch, who was so good in a Craftsman Truck at 16 that NASCAR passed a rule mandating that all national series drivers be at least 18. Busch made his Cup debut at 19, won at 20, and is the series points leader now at 23.

"He's a full-time Nationwide driver, and with that expertise -- winning a race already this year and doing everything he's done in the Nationwide Series -- I believe he'll be fine," Busch said of Logano. "There's not a whole lot of media hoopla over there on that side. I feel like he's got the talent. If he gets good communication with his crew chief, which he's already worked on and done well with, he'll be fine."

For drivers of previous generations, competing at NASCAR's highest level at 18 was simply unthinkable. When Richard Petty first started out in 1958, NASCAR had a rule that mandated all drivers in the Grand National Series (what Sprint Cup was called then) be 21. Even after that changed, there was a pattern to be followed -- do anything it takes to get any car, just focus on qualifying, and try to move into better equipment as you proved yourself. Trusting young drivers with championship-caliber seats was a risk few owners, if any, were willing to take. Dale Jarrett's first quality ride, with Cale Yarbrough, came when he was 30. Dale Earnhardt was 28 when he broke through, Martin 29. Harry Gant was 40 before he won his first race.

"It's not like when I first started in Winston Cup. I was in the same boat as a lot of guys when they first get in," Sterling Marlin, 26 when he went full-time in Cup in 1983, told reporters several years ago. "You do anything and drive anything to get in. All you're looking for is seat time. You don't think about winning races, you think about making races. Now, these guys are climbing into cars with winning, experienced teams. You put a really good driver into a really good car, and they are going to get to the front."

Marlin was talking about the previous batch of young drivers to enter the sport, guys like Newman, Kenseth and Kahne. But the same holds true for Logano, and any teenaged driver who may follow him.

"He's going to have a great advantage getting into equipment that is really, really competitive right now," Burton said. "They're not going to have to be searching for something as he's learning. And don't forget, I don't know how many laps that kid has in the [new car], but it's a lot. Everywhere I go to test, he's there. He's got a lot of laps in these cars. The biggest adjustment is going to be how competitive it is. When you run 18th in a Cup race, you're in the middle of a dogfight. When you run 18th in a Nationwide race, you're running really poorly. It's a whole other world. The competition from top to bottom is just so much more competitive. Adjusting to that is going to be the biggest thing."

Management at Gibbs has few doubts that Logano can do it. To them, the off-track issues -- sponsor appearances, dealing with the media, the spotlight on him at all times -- loom as potentially a bigger hurdle for their 18-year-old driver.

"I think for him, the way things are, he's more mature than most guys out there," said J.D. Gibbs, president of the Gibbs team. "From an experience standpoint, we were real careful from day one and we didn't want to rush him. He's been here three years. If it took him three more years to get to Cup, that would be fine. The reality of it is, we watched everything he did, really watching him last year in the Camping World Series and watching him test with our guys. I think what you saw is a guy who, the talent is there. Now, we'll have to work with him. There's a lot of stuff. I'm not worried about the on-track stuff as much as the off-track stuff. That's a lot required of him to be doing all that. With his family surrounding him and our guys, we'll be in good shape."

Like all the other drivers of his day, Burton took the slow, arduous road to Cup success. He did it because the car owners of the time gave him no other option. But with Logano, things are different. And if Burton had a seat open today?

"I'd put him in it in a heartbeat," he said. "How do I say this without being rude -- when I say that I think it was better for me to do it the way that I did it, that doesn't mean you can do it like that today. If you've run in the Nationwide Series for four or five years and haven't had much success, there's not many people like that getting Cup rides today. But that was common when I did it. It's common now to take a kid you think has talent and put him in it. If I were the Gibbs group and that seat were available, that would be my candidate. I'd put him in there and I'd put my arm around him and say, 'We're with you, it's going to be hard, it's going to be tough, but we got your back. Don't try to do more than you can do.' And I'd send him on his way."