Joey Logano's Daytona 500 Debut Ends In The Wall; Matt Kenseth Gets Rain Shortened Win

The Daytona 500 debut of 18-year old Middletown native Joey Logano ended in an abbreviated fashion with his team left loading a wrecked car back into the hauler well before the end of the race.

Logano, in his first Sprint Cup Series points event in the No. 20 Home Depot sponsored Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, crashed on lap 80 of the 200-lap Daytona 500.

Logano's day ended with the front end of his car crashed after a hard crash into the inside retaining just before pit road.

"I don't think I should say what I'm feeling inside," Logano said. "I'm not very happy. We were just getting going. We got a few pit stops under our belt and started to come to the front a little bit. We had to make a few adjustments to make the car better. We just didn't get there in time."

Logano ended up in last place of the 43 cars in the field. Matt Kenseth won when the race was called because of rain after 152 laps, 48 short of the scheduled distance. Kevin Harvick was second and A.J. Allmendinger was third.



Logano started 9th in the race but spent most of his time on the track outside of the top-20.

He was running around 27th when initial contact with fellow rookie Scott Speed and subsequent contact from Greg Biffle sent him sliding sideways off the track coming off turn 4 and into the wall at the 2.5-mile speedway.

"It just looked like [Scott Speed] kept getting loose in front of me so I jumped down below him in the middle of the corner just to try to get some air on my car because it was tight and as he kept [slowing down] I ended up next to him on the corner," Logano said. "It was either I was going to dump him or hopefully not do anything at all. [Greg Biffle] just came up and got us. It's a racing deal, but it's a bummer for all the Home Depot crew here. This is not the way we wanted to finish the [Daytona] 500."

Logano, who replaced Tony Stewart in the No. 20 car, was the youngest driver ever to start the event.

It was the end of what was at times a frustrating 10 days in Daytona for Logano. His team struggled much of the week to get a consistent handle on his car.

"I think overall he was alright," team president J.D. Gibbs said. "This place takes a while to figure out. I think doing what he did, the ARCA stuff, the Nationwide stuff, he'll be fine. It was just 'Hey, just finish it.' That's all he was trying to do. A lot of stuff happens here out of your control. He just kind of got tapped.

"It's a lot for anybody here, I don't care if you're 50 or 18. If you're new to it, this place takes a while. He did a good job learning and working with [teammates Kyle Busch and Denny Hamlin] to get their input. He'll be fine. We've taken a lot of good cars here before and didn't finish. It's frustrating but that's part of Daytona."

by Shawn Courchesne for the Hartford Courant

Ask.com Launches Serial Nascar Push

Nascar viewers are going to get to know the Ray clan intimately. Beginning with the racing season's start at Daytona on Sunday, Ask.com will launch 36 new ads featuring this "colorful Nascar family."

Meant to play out like a sitcom, the ads feature slices of life as the Ray family enjoys race season together. A new ad will break each week for 36 weeks.

Ask.com became the official search engine of Nascar last month. In addition to becoming the home of Nascar racing in terms of the in-depth information it can provide, it will power Nascar.com and sponsor a car in the Sprint Cup Series. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.

Ask.com is currently the fifth most-popular search engine, accounting for slightly less than 2 percent of all U.S. searches in January, per Nielsen Online. No. 1 Google was used for 62.8 percent of all searches, followed by Yahoo! (16.2 percent), MSN (11.2 percent) and AOL (4 percent).

The search engine hopes its ubiquitous ad campaign will turn 75 million-plus loyal Nascar fans into regular users. “Nascar is our No. 1 most queried sport. People are emotionally connected with it,” said Ask.com CEO Jim Safka. “We’ve rallied the entire company around the sport. [But], we don’t just want to win [users] over in terms of questions they’ve got about Nascar, we want to become their search engine.”

Spots will air approximately five times during each race. In one, Karen Ray (mom) ogles driver Bobby Labonte through a pair of binoculars. Her husband Billy Ray asks: "Why don't you keep that north of the Mason-Dixon line, alright?" Karen Ray responds: "Do they wear anything under those suits honey?" The Ask.com search box then appears with the question: "What do Nascar drivers wear under their suits?"

Other ads ask: "What kind of car does Bobby Labonte drive when he's not on the track?" and "What is the fastest time a pit crew has ever changed a tire?"

“A lot of companies do their obligatory spot to say we’re involved with Nascar,” said Doug Raboy, managing partner/creative director at Hanft Raboy & Partners, which created the campaign. “We know they watch it every week. We wanted to give them something new to watch and learn about [Ask.com] every week. We’re not just some carpetbaggers.”

The length of the deal moving forward will depend on how many fans begin using the site, said Safka. However, the association has already produced one unexpected offshoot in the form of interest in a TV series based on the Rays. “It could turn into something much bigger,” Safka said of the ad push.

The search engine's robust TV schedule comes after a quiet 2008 when it spent only $6 million on traditional media for the first 11 months of the year, per Nielsen Monitor-Plus. In 2007, however, it spent almost $50 million. Safka would not quantify this year's investment.

by Kenneth Hein, Brandweek for adweek.com