To kick off its 19th season of Thursday Thunder for Legends and Bandolero drivers, Atlanta Motor Speedway brought in some of the legends of the series that is the entry-level circuit of choice for many an aspiring young race driver.
The “old-timers” of the Legends series who came to AMS on Wednesday were Sprint Cup drivers Joey Logano, David Ragan and Reed Sorenson, all of whom raced at AMS in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Logano, fresh off a win in the Sprint All-Star race at Charlotte Motor Speedway on Saturday night, said his racing career really got started with a visit to the speedway.
The Logano family, from Middletown, Conn., was in metro Atlanta to visit Joey’s uncle. While here they decided to tour AMS and ran into Ken Ragan, David’s father and a former Sprint Cup driver who runs the track’s Legends program.
Young Joey took a test drive in a Bandolero, the entry-level racer of the Legend series. And Ragan, who is passionate about the program and not good at taking “no” for an answer, sold the Loganos on the series. And he went one step further.
“He sold us that car that day,” Logano said.
Soon the Loganos were living in metro Atlanta, and Joey was learning the ropes at AMS, where he still holds the record for consecutive Legends wins, with 14 in 2000 and 2001.
“We were from Connecticut,” he said. “We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know anything about racing. My parents didn’t race, and we just kind of winged it and had fun with it.
“We’d show up and work hard and figure out all this stuff, and it was just a fun, family, growing experience.”
Ironically, Logano, who now drives the No. 22 Ford for Team Penske and has 14 Sprint Cup victories and 25 in the Xfinity Series, has never won on the big track at AMS. But he said he’s getting better at it, as evidenced by his two top-five Cup finishes in his past four starts at the track.
As part of Tuesday’s program at AMS, some youngsters now in the Legends program — Joshua Hicks, Nathan Jackson and Dylan Murry — got to ask the Cup drivers for career advice.
Murry is the son of veteran sports-car racer David Murry, but the youngster hopes to take a different career path and become an oval-track racer and work his way to the Sprint Cup series.
Sorenson, who grew up in nearby Peachtree City, urged the youngsters to enjoy themselves during this time in their careers.
“When I was racing Legends, if I didn’t win or do good I thought it was the end of the world,” Sorenson said. “We all put pressure on ourselves, but it’s not the end of the world if you don’t win.”
Sorenson also said the Legends, with their high horsepower-to-weight ratio and tires with little grip are good vehicles for those wanting to learn how to control race cars at high speeds.
“These (Legends) cars are not easy to drive,” said Sorenson, who now drives the No. 55 Chevrolet for Premium Motorsports in the Sprint Cup Series. “Anybody who has ever driven them knows that you need a lot of car control.
“What you can learn from these cars and what you can learn from the competition definitely helps you for that next level.”
David Ragan also urged the current group of Legends racers to try to enjoy themselves and to take lots of pictures and videos at the track.
“As a kid, it’s neat to just be at a race track that the NASCAR stars are racing at on the weekends,” he said, adding that as a youngster he liked the idea of racing on the same asphalt as drivers such as Jeff Gordon and the late Dale Earnhardt. “When you’re 8, 9, 10 years old, that’s a really neat thing.”
Legends drivers race on a quarter-mile track that uses part of the big track’s front stretch and part of pit road.
Ragan, who now drives the No. 23 Toyota for BK Racing in the Cup series, also said he wasn’t zeroed in on a NASCAR career when he drove Legends.
“When you’re a young kid, you’re not really thinking about 10 years down the road and trying to get into the NASCAR world or what you’re going to do with your career, your job when you’re finished with school,” he said. “You’re just worried about having fun. You make a lot of friends in the garage, and it’s a family thing.”
Ragan helped make Tuesday’s event fun for the participants by ribbing Logano, who celebrated his 26th birthday at the track, about his early years, when Logano had a way of coming up with a birth certificate that showed him being the age he needed to be to race in a particular Legends division.
Logano laughed about it, too.
“I guess I’m 26,” he said.
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