LAKE PLACID, N.Y. - Joey Logano looked up at the scoreboard as dusk fell over the bobsled track at Mount Van Hoevenberg and shook his head.

"He brought some heat. Damn! How did he do that?" Logano lamented Friday after road race ace and Carslsbad resident Boris Said won the pole for the Bodine Bobsled Challenge. "I was doing good, but I hit the nose and hit the rear. I've got to find a little heat. I'm not here to run second."

Said, whose late father, Bob, drove in the 1968 and 1972 Winter Olympics for the U.S. bobsled team, continued his nearly impeccable record in this unique event. He's won all but one of the races since the Bobsled Challenge debuted in 2006.

"After winning three out of four, the odds go down that you're going to win all of them," said Said, who edged drag racer Morgan Lucas by .23 seconds over two qualifying runs.

Former NASCAR Cup driver Larry Gunselman was third, followed by Craftsman Truck Series driver Johnny Benson and Logano, Busch East Series champion.

This is the third edition of the Bobsled Challenge, which features race car drivers on ice. Former NASCAR driver Geoff Bodine has been involved with bobsledding since watching the 1992 Winter Olympics on television and noticing that the U.S. teams were using European-made sleds. He created the Bo-Dyn Bobsled Project Inc. to help make sure U.S. sleds would be made in America, and his efforts have since helped provide the U.S. Bobsled and Skeleton Federation with sleds designs involving NASCAR technology.

And it's starting to pay off. The United States has won four medals in the last two Winter Olympic Games, and current driver Steve Holcomb is the defending two-man and overall World Cup champion and tops the international field this season with three golds, two silvers and a bronze in six World Cup races.

The Bobsled Challenge, whose chief sponsors are Chevrolet and Whelen Engineering, will feature two separate races today. In the morning event, all 15 drivers will make two runs, and whoever turns in the lowest combined time wins.

In the second race, drivers will be split into two groups - five NASCAR guys against five drag racers from the NHRA - and it will be like a drag race with the drivers competing head-to-head. The final heat will feature the top NASCAR driver against the top NHRA driver, with the winner claiming gold.

"I don't think the NASCAR guys want to get beat by the NHRA guys, so we'll do our best to keep them behind us," Whelen Modified champ Donny Lia said.

Also competing are: two-time Busch Series champ Randy LaJoie; Craftsman Truck Series champions Todd Bodine and Ron Hornaday Jr.; Whelen All-American Series champ Steve Carlson; Whelen Southern Modified Tour champ L.W. Miller; and draggers J.R. Todd, Jeg Coughlin Jr., Phil Burkhart and Bob Vandergriff.

Members of the New York State Army National Guard will serve as brakemen on all sleds.

Logano, one of the very young guns of NASCAR who will make his Cup debut at Dover in May - a week after he turns 18 - proved a quick study a day after seeing a bobsled track up close and personal for the first time in his life.

"When you walk the place is where it really sets in," said Logano, a developmental driver for Joe Gibbs Racing. "That pretty much is a wall (of ice). You're like upside down."

Indeed. No pansy 34-degree banked turns like NASCAR's so-called bullring in Bristol, Tenn.

"This was probably more nerve-racking than qualifying for the Daytona 500 because you don't know what to expect," said Hornaday, another rookie here. "You don't know the track conditions, you don't understand the track conditions. We're down there running into the walls. It's like Bristol and Martinsville all over again."

Especially for Todd and Carlson, who flipped in practice but escaped unscathed.

"This is pretty wild stuff," said Benson, also a first-timer. "I rode the first time I went down, and after I rode I was like, 'You know, it would be all right if I didn't drive."'

Lia discovered the secret of going fast - it's the sled. He topped the speed charts on his first run and was next to last the second time down after switching sleds. Said was nowhere near the top in practice, switched sleds with Lucas, and became the man to beat.

"There's a couple of sleds that are way off, and this is one of them," Lia said. "We get a better sled, and we'll be all right. You don't get a good sled, it don't matter how you drive, you ain't going to go fast."

And rest assured Lucas won't be lending his sled come race time.

"I've got dibs on that one," he said.