When Joey Logano‘s NASCAR Cup Series rookie season took place in 2009, he only had half a year of Xfinity Series experience and a single Camping World Truck Series start to his name, a deviation from the traditional ladder ascendance of Trucks followed by Xfinity and Cup. On 16 April, he will return to the lowest national division as he enters the Bristol Motor Speedway Dirt event for David Gilliland Racing.
Logano confirmed the news on Friday evening with a video of him driving a production Ford F-150 around a makeshift dirt oval before making a phone call to enter the race. The video ends with him remarking, “Uh oh.”
Such a phrase is right for the rest of the Truck Series. Cup drivers have unsurprisingly seen much success in lower tiers, and Logano will arrive as the defending Cup Series winner on Bristol’s dirt configuration. Said win was the Cup Series’ first race on dirt since 1970, and Logano also scored another inaugural victory when he won the first-ever Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum NASCAR race via the Busch Light Clash in February.
Although Logano has seen much success at the Cup and Xfinity levels, he only has seven career Truck starts. After a twenty-sixth in his series debut at Talladega in 2008 for HT Motorsports, he made sporadic starts for Brad Keselowski Racing —an operation owned by his then-Team Penske team-mate—from 2013 to 2015. The last of his BKR starts, at Martinsville, saw him win the pole and lead 150 laps en route to the victory. He is one of thirty-eight drivers to win a race in the Cup, Xfinity, and Truck Series.
A number was not revealed, though he is expected to pilot the #17 for DGR as it is the team’s multi-driver truck. The #17 has been split between Riley Herbst, Ryan Preece, and Taylor Gray in 2022. After three races, the truck is seventh in owner points with Preece holding its best finish of fourth at Las Vegas.
Now in his fourteenth full season of Cup competition, the 2018 series champion sits second in points after five rounds with three top tens.