Driver diary: What to expect from Lady in Black?

By: By Joey Logano | SCNOW
Published: May 08, 2009

It’s been a pretty busy week leading into Darlington.

That’s probably a good thing. I haven’t decided if I’m excited about this weekend or not. I just have no idea what to expect. We tested The Home Depot Toyota at Daytona on Monday and Tuesday with nine other teams, and I asked Mark Martin about this place.

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I figure anything I can learn before I get here will be helpful.

Every little bit helps. I even got a copy of last year’s race Thursday and Mike McLaughlin and I will watch it tonight.

This is one of the weekends where I am really glad I’m running the Nationwide Series race with our GameStop car. I think the more laps I can get around here the better since I’ve never raced here before.

I came to watch Denny (Hamlin) during the tire test back in March and was amazed by it. The Lady in Black is unreal.

Last month, I had one of the coolest opportunities. I was doing a promotion for this weekend’s race with Cale Yarborough. We did a press conference, and then got changed into our firesuits so he could give me a ride-a-long around the track.

So I come out in my clean Home Depot uniform and out walks Cale in one of his old school firesuits.

It was awesome.

I told him I wanted one of those. We climbed into the car and I couldn’t help but smile every time I looked over at him.

As we were going around the track he was “sawing” at the wheel. At the end of the day we walked around the museum and interviewed him for ESPN while he was telling me some really cool stories about back in the day.

The whole day was just one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

Well, hopefully, today goes well. I know it will take me a few laps to figure it out, but the team has been running really well lately.

I guess I will let you know tomorrow.