Why full appreciation for Jimmie Johnson's success will take time
Twenty-five or 30 years from now, when guys like Chase Elliott and Erik Jones and Ryan Blaney are pondering retirement, NASCAR fans will be telling their kids and grandkids, “Yeah, those guys are great, but you should have seen Jimmie Johnson race. He was a wheelman.”
And they’ll be right, even if Johnson’s phenomenal success hasn’t been fully recognized and appreciated in the here and now.
It’s the nature of sports, I suppose, to wax rhapsodic about athletes from the previous generation, but it seems particularly pervasive in NASCAR. Too many times, the brilliance of the present takes a back seat to the perfection of memories.
With that thought in mind, I will says this right now, without any hesitation whatsoever: Jimmie Johnson’s five consecutive NASCAR Premier Series championships is one of the most remarkable records in the history of sports. Not just NASCAR history, the history of sports, period.
Think about this for a minute: Since the NASCAR Strictly Stock Series began racing in 1949, Johnson is the only driver to win more than three straight championships. Cale Yarborough is the only other driver to win as many as three in a row. Dale Earnhardt never won three in a row, nor did Richard Petty or Darrell Waltrip or David Pearson or any of the sport’s other legends.
But Johnson has five in a row, and on Nov. 20 at Homestead-Miami Speedway, he will have a chance to win a record-tying seventh overall championship.
Whether Johnson wins championship No. 7 or not, or whether he goes on to win eight or nine, doesn’t really matter in terms of his legacy, which is already firmly established. With six championships and 79 race victories, Johnson already stands tall as one of the sport’s all-time greats.
Johnson, crew chief Chad Knaus and the entire No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports team have been an incredible combination over the years.
And after the Martinsville victory, Knaus shared some insight into what motivates the team to continue to perform at an elite level.
“It's not about the numbers,” said Knaus. “It's not about seven (championships). It's not about tying Dale. It's not about tying Richard. It's not about beating Dale or Richard, beating Jeff for most wins.”
And then Knaus told the media, “I think you guys miss what we're about.”
But Knaus was just getting started.
“We want to go win Texas. You follow me?” he said. “We want to go win Homestead. We want to go win Phoenix. Then, guess what, in a few months Daytona is rolling around, we want to win that one, too. That's the way we approach every single race. It's not about what we're eclipsing.”
That’s true.
And it’s also true that so far in this Chase, what Johnson, Knaus and the No. 48 has been eclipsing is the competition. We’ll soon know whether or not they can do it for three more races and take home a seventh championship trophy.
