It doesn’t seem like much time has passed since that weekend in June 2000 when time stood still, let alone a quarter century, and in some ways, a lifetime.
He was just a kid then, a couple of years younger than me, truth be told, and well, if you didn’t know his name then, you’re not alone. Rookies driving for underfunded teams and who had yet to lead a single lap in what was then the NASCAR Busch Series didn’t exactly grab headlines. If most fans had barely given the kid a second glance, well, he hadn’t given them much reason to.
He’d probably rather have gotten everyone’s attention that day by winning, but that’s not what happened. If there’s any consolation, what did happen still makes the highlight reels.
A red, white and blue car. Not so much racing now as simply careening along, just skimming the ground, only the white wall in front of it. A shower of Styrofoam, exploding on impact and falling like snow. The car buried to its rear wheels. Hold your breath, because it didn’t look good.
And then here’s this kid with goofy hair and what looked like set of solid brass, standing on the roof of the car, arms flung to the sky like he’d just won the whole race.
Later, they’d call him arrogant. They’d call him every name in the book, but in that moment? They breathed a sigh of relief that he was OK. He was just a kid with a whole career ahead of him, and Jimmie Johnson was just happy to be alive.
But the years spin by, and Wednesday (Sept. 17), that kid with the goofy hair, the struggling rookie who would not score a single top five in 2000, turns 50 years old, and that whole career is behind him. And what a career it was.
When Johnson landed a NASCAR Cup Series ride with powerhouse Hendrick Motorsports, hand-picked by teammate and part-owner of the new No. 48 team, Jeff Gordon, the choice was puzzling. Johnson had one career win in what’s now the NASCAR Xfinity Series (he’d never win in that series again, even in an era where double-dipping by Cup drivers was allowed and even encouraged). Gordon saw something in him: talent, hunger, fear of failure.
At NASCAR’s top level, the wins came often and looked easy. By the time he won his first Cup Series title, Johnson had already won 27 times, Hall of Fame numbers already after just five years. His three wins as a rookie in 2002 tied a Cup Series record at the time. He’s the only rookie ever to lead the driver points standings.
For the next decade, Johnson terrorized the Cup field, stacking up wins and another six titles, putting him in the company of NASCAR royalty.
He didn’t win by wantonly wrecking other drivers. He overcame issues during races that looked like they could have ended his day. He gave his team precise, thoughtful feedback that they thrived on together. Oh, he could have a temper during races like every other driver, but he didn’t pick fights or create controversy. As a champion, he carried himself with class.
What he was was an absolute bulldog when he had the lead in his sights. Sometimes he’d get there by sheer will and hang on with everything he had. You’d think he couldn’t possibly make a pass stick or that his equipment couldn’t match his will, but there he’d be, pulling it off.
You can say his titles aren’t as meaningful as Richard Petty’s or Dale Earnhardt’s. Maybe they aren’t, and that’s a shame because Johnson won them with the system he was given. When NASCAR changed the system his team had mastered six times, Johnson put himself in position to capitalize on the way the final race played out and won another one. The system wasn’t his fault. He also missed a full season title by fewer than a race’s worth of points in 2003.
He was so good for so long that when it ended, it came as a shock. Johnson won three times early in 2017 but would race three more years in the Cup Series before dabbling in the NTT IndyCar Series for a couple of years.
He was, as expected, a first-ballot Hall of Famer alongside his longtime crew chief, Chad Knaus. He bought Legacy Motor Club a couple of years ago, and while he races a couple of times a year to scratch the itch, he’s deeply vested in growing his team and his drivers, Erik Jones and John Hunter Nemechek. At age 50, his NASCAR legacy is still growing.
And yet it doesn’t seem so very long ago that a 24-year-old kid, with goofy hair and the kind of bravado that only comes from sheer terror, was climbing from a car buried halfway into the wall and onto the roof, just happy to be alive because he’d thought the wall was concrete.
Time is a strange companion in racing. The sport is built on moments, and those moments somehow simultaneously fly by and barely crawl. You look up and suddenly years, decades — a whole career — have passed by.
I’m not the wide-eyed newcomer to the sport that I was in 2000 either. Drivers have come and gone, entire careers begun and ended since then. And it wasn’t — can’t possibly have been — all that long ago that the 50-year-old team owner was the seven-time champion, or winning his first title or just a kid with goofy hair who nobody knew until they were thanking their lucky stars right along with him that that wall wasn’t concrete.
Amy is an 20-year veteran NASCAR writer and a six-time National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) writing award winner, including first place awards for both columns and race coverage. As well as serving as Photo Editor, Amy writes The Big 6 (Mondays) after every NASCAR Cup Series race. She can also be found working on her bi-weekly columns Holding A Pretty Wheel (Tuesdays) and Only Yesterday (Wednesdays). A New Hampshire native whose heart is in North Carolina, Amy’s work credits have extended everywhere from driver Kenny Wallace’s website to Athlon Sports. She can also be heard weekly as a panelist on the Hard Left Turn podcast that can be found on AccessWDUN.com's Around the Track page.