Logan Brown reflects on Salina Highbanks championship: ‘One of the greatest feelings I’ve ever had’

Logan Brown’s 2022 race season at Salina Highbanks Speedway started with him and his crew getting their car ready about six hours before the first race. The season ended with Brown’s first championship. Brown won the Dawson Roofing Super Stocks championship at Salina, a NASCAR-sanctioned oval track in Pryor, Oklahoma. The title was won after Brown picked up three wins and 14 top-five finishes in 19 races, giving him the victory by 117 points. On opening night, after Brown took the final six hours to take a nap, his last-minute fixes paid off. “We came out the first night of the season and we actually ended up winning that night,” Brown said. “So that just put more of a kick into us. I told my dad I think we can go for the championship this year, and if everything goes well, I think we can win it. “And from then on we just showed up every week and did our best.” Every week, Brown spent his downtime before races talking with friends and competitors about what he would do if he won the championship. A title is something he’s been chasing since he began racing as a teenager six years ago. “I come from a really small town, and it does have it’s supporters; there are people who support me and my buddy, but mostly it’s people that hate to see you do better,” he said. “I was just wanting people to know that I’m capable of doing that as well, because all these years I’ve been told, ‘You won’t do this,’ or, ‘You won’t do that.’ That just came to my mind, I can show them. If I win then I can show all these people that doubted me what I can do.” When Brown was growing up, his grandfather always had cars in the garage, and Brown would often jump in them and pretend like he was driving. Finally, one day his grandpa told him he could take a car into the parking lot. “I kept making the rounds and kept getting faster and faster,” Brown said. “Finally, I started tearing his gravel up and his roads, and he finally said, ‘It’s time to go to the track or something, because you’re tearing my driveway up.’ “He played a big, big part in it, so I’ve got to give a lot of the glory to him.” Unfortunately for Brown, the track where he wanted to race had an age limit of 14. With a November birthday, when Brown turned 14, he had to wait several months before the following season rolled around. The joy he gets behind the wheel was worth waiting for, and it’s a feeling Brown has been chasing ever since. “I guess it would be just the feeling of everything else in the world just went away for me,” he said. “Homework, sports, school, woman problems, stuff like that, it just all went away, and I was focused in on one thing… There’s nothing I would rather do. If I could race every single day of the week and get paid for it, I’d do it in a heartbeat.” Brown moved up a class last season. He credited his team and a more patient approach, taking their time to learn everything they could about the car, with their newfound success. He received help from his mom, dad, girlfriend, Maddilyn, and good friend, Aiden, who was there all 12 times they swapped out motors last season. “I’m talking 2 in the morning the night before the races, we’d swap motors, gears, tires, everything, and he’s been there,” Brown said of his friend. “Dad and mom, they’re huge in it, too. Without them I couldn’t do it. I could probably do it, but I’d be pinching pennies a lot worse than I am now.” There was another new member of the team last year, too: Former Salina driver Kyle Davis, who took Brown under his wing as a mentor. Growing up, Brown used to watch Davis drive at Salina and said “I always picked him to win when my grandpa would take me to races to watch.” Davis has his own chassis business now. He helped Brown with car set-up. “I think the reason why we get along so well is because he has the same kind of passion and drive for the sport that I do,” Brown said. “Coming from others that personally know Kyle, they’ve all told me the same thing. Kyle, he doesn’t just help anybody. He only helps people he sees something in, and that actually means to world to me that he took a chance on my program and made it 10 times better than what it was.” Davis will join Brown as they go on the road this summer, making time to race at Salina as often as possible. He’ll keep chasing wins and championships for as long as possible, but he’ll never forget the first. “It means more than a lot of things to me. It’s one of the greatest feelings that I’ve ever had,” Brown said. “I know it’s just a track championship to some people, but it’s something that I’ve worked a lot of years of my life for, and it just means that much more to me that I accomplished it.”