Sum of all parts is what put Johnson in inaugural class

Talent on track, personality off track a huge boon to sport

By David Caraviello, NASCAR.COM
October 17, 2009
12:38 AM EDT

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CONCORD, N.C. -- Junior Johnson never won a championship as a driver in NASCAR. He won six titles as a car owner, but if that were the fundamental criterion for his election to the sport's nascent Hall of Fame, he'd have to line up beside or behind others like Rick Hendrick and Richard Childress. There is no singular achievement that earned Johnson, now a purveyor of moonshine and country ham, a place in the shrine's inaugural class. Much like the race cars he once built, his sum is greater than his individual parts.

The first class

Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, Bill France Jr., Junior Johnson and Bill France Sr. will be enshrined in May 2010.

Each of the five men elected to NASCAR's first Hall of Fame class on Wednesday played a role in building the sport, some more obviously than others. Bill France cobbled together a loose confederation of racing organizations and unified them under one sanctioning body. Bill France Jr. transformed a regional tour defined by dirt tracks and small towns into a national series featuring major markets and glitzy speedways. Richard Petty shook every hand, obliged every autograph request, and won over as many hearts and minds outside the car as he did in it. Dale Earnhardt, gritty and relentless, gave those in the grandstands someone who reminded them of themselves.

And then there was Johnson, better known today by his statistics, those 50 career victories as a driver and six championships as an owner, three each with Cale Yarborough and Darrell Waltrip. He won races, he butted heads, he made enemies, he pushed the rules in his day further than Chad Knaus or Ray Evernham ever dared to.

He had a mysterious, larger-than-life back story that involved running moonshine and serving prison time. No wonder it was Junior Johnson that novelist and social critic Tom Wolfe decided to profile when the white-suited dandy took on the subject of stock-car racing, resulting in his The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson epic that appeared in the pages of Esquire magazine in 1965.

He has no specific accomplishment that matches up to those of his fellow inductees; Johnson did not win seven championships as a driver, or found a sport, or take it national. But the beauty of Junior Johnson is that his greatness defies classification -- he was a winning driver, a championship car owner, a master mechanic and engine builder, and through Wolfe a pioneer in shaping NASCAR's national appeal. Johnson wasn't the greatest ever to compete in NASCAR, but he was perhaps the most complete.

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"He might have been the only car owner who was ever a jack man. Ever. I can remember him slinging that jack. He had a technique where he would back away from the jack to go to the other side, and pull it and sling it around the car. I remember one time, we had some footage where he knocked an official on his [butt]. We played that at the banquet in New York," recalled NASCAR vice president Jim Hunter.

"He was the total package. He was an engine builder. He built transmissions. Junior was brilliant when he came to that. He talks about 'the good parts' he'd put back there in the warehouse. And he would build the motor, not a mechanic in his shop."

Class of 2010

Relive the moment as Brian France reveals the five who received the inaugural vote.

Through Wolfe, he became a household name. The writer traveled to Wilkes County, N.C., to see Johnson in his element, and the result was an opus that intertwined whiskey and Southern Baptist preachers and big white Pontiacs and women in tight blue jeans begging Junior to sign their hands.

It pointed out that even then some top drivers traveled in private planes, and even then the money was pretty good relatively speaking, and even then NASCAR raced in California and the Northeast. But the star was clearly Johnson, and the hero-worship that surrounded him, and the dashing, dangerous elements of his twin worlds of auto racing and moonshine.

It got people, people who lived in high-rise buildings in big cities, talking about this strange automotive and cultural phenomenon that few of them had ever encountered before. Paul Harvey, a preeminent radio host of the day, mentioned the Johnson story on his program. It spawned a curiosity that had not previously existed.

"It was well-received, and it opened eyes, I think," said Hunter, a sports writer himself before he moved into NASCAR administration. "It created a lot of curiosity, like, is Junior really this way? Is he for real? And sure enough, he's for real."

He's for real, all right. Even now, at 78, with a titanium rod implanted in his back, it's easy to see glimpses of the bulldog driver he once was, of the taskmaster car owner he was known to be, of the perpetual rule-twisting pain in the rump he must have been to NASCAR officials. Which of all his accomplishments would he prefer to have on his headstone? "I'd probably be better to have, 'He didn't cheat as much as everybody thought he did,'" Johnson said. "But that would be a lie. I cheated more than they thought I did."

Oh, could he be a handful. It occasionally got so heated between him and France Jr. that "me and him were sometimes in fistfights," Johnson said. Old-timers well remember his clashes with drivers like Bobby Allison and Geoff Bodine. He won six titles as a car owner, but thinks he could have won many more.

"If I go back and look at what my history was, it would not have been unreasonable for me to win 10 or 12, because I had the equipment, and I had the people to do it with," he said Friday at Lowe's Motor Speedway. "It was just, circumstantial things did not work out the way it should have."

And yet, Johnson is clearly touched by his Hall of Fame selection, calling it the highlight of his already illustrious career. Viewed simply in the context of a driver, or a car owner, or a pioneer, it's easy to see Johnson as the fifth man elected in the inaugural five-man class. Put it all together, though, and few can match him. In 1965, Wolfe anointed Johnson as the last American hero. But another of the writer's titles seems to fit Junior Johnson the best: A Man in Full.

Sound Off: Johnson comments on his induction

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.