When Jimmie Johnson retires, his legacy with NASCAR won’t be as a 7-time champion

To understand exactly how Jimmie Johnson was at one point as a NASCAR driver, you should remember the verb that his name inspired.

Unflappable, confident and brimming with California cool, Johnson rocketed to a record five straight series championships from 2006-10. So people started wondering how they could “Jimmie-proof” the Cup series. Change the playoff format? Modify the spoiler? What could stop the No. 48 Chevrolet?

It turns out nobody was going to “Jimmie-proof” anything, other than Father Time. Johnson, 44, hasn’t won much the past couple of years, didn’t make the playoffs in 2019 and so now he has decided that he’s finally going to slow himself down.

Johnson said Wednesday he was going to stop driving full-time after the 2020 NASCAR season, which means he’s about to have a 38-race retirement party next year and then go on to whatever comes next.

What will that be? He’s not exactly sure, but he does know how he’d like to be remembered as a driver.

“For being one of the good guys out there on the track,” Johnson said Thursday, “not for standing up and holding a trophy somewhere. More of that heartfelt thing than the stats.”

Fair enough. It’s impossible to dislike Johnson if you know him even a little bit. He was — and is — one of the good guys.

But it would also do Johnson a disservice to recite the most important statistic of his career — he has won seven Cup series championships overall, which ties him with Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt Sr. for the most ever. If you’re putting four drivers atop NASCAR’s Mt. Rushmore, those are three of them. You can argue among yourselves about the fourth.

Johnson’s many roles

When Johnson was at his best, he was “a computer in the car,” as his longtime team owner Rick Hendrick said Thursday during a press conference to explain why Johnson would no longer be a full-time driver after the 2020 NASCAR season.

“Jimmie was a machine who could really dissect a car like I’d never seen before,” Hendrick said.

Johnson was a lot more than that, of course — a husband, a doting father, a charitable dynamo, a marathon runner and a guy who climbed on top of a golf cart once and broke his wrist horsing around up there.

People didn’t remember that last one too often, though. Johnson was widely thought to be perfect, so perfect that people sometimes couldn’t stand it.

Bruton Smith, the owner of Charlotte Motor Speedway and also a neighbor of Johnson’s for many years, once told me that the best thing that could happen to NASCAR would be for Johnson to get out of his race car, haul off and slap somebody.

“I just think it would help him maybe get away from that vanilla part of Jimmie,” Smith said. “He would show people the other side of Jimmie Johnson. Hey, if he needs to, he can hit me.”

That wasn’t Johnson’s style, though he could be aggressive on the track when he needed to be. He has won 83 Cup Series races, although the last one came in 2017. His seventh Cup championship came in 2016, but he fell to 14th in 2018 and then missed the playoffs for the first time in 2019 with an 18th-place series finish.

Still, Johnson said his poor results for the past two seasons weren’t the reason he will step away. Instead, he said, he felt it in his gut. He knew it was time, he said, in much the same way he knew long ago it was time to ask his future wife to marry him.

And spending time with his two daughters, ages 9 and 6, also played a part. His 9-year-old, Genevieve, drew the biggest applause of Johnson’s retirement news conference when she introduced her father along with her younger sister, Lydia.

Johnson vs. Gordon

The biggest NASCAR drivers have these long-runway retirements, allowing their race teams to go on a search for their successor and their sponsors to get a lot of bang for the final-year buck. Johnson will undoubtedly compete for some victories next year, too, especially at his favorite tracks.

“Next year is not a mail-it-in year,” Johnson said. “We’re going to win races and compete for a championship.”

Johnson will continue to race some, in other series and as part of “one-off” deals. A fitness buff who forced other NASCAR drivers into the gym as they tried to keep up with him, it’s likely he will do some more endurance racing of some kind. But the day-to-day grind will be gone this time next year.

Hendrick said he knew something was up when Johnson called him and asked for a private meeting. “Every time one of these drivers calls me and wants to come to my house, I know that’s not a good situation,” Hendrick said.

Johnson was never as beloved a figure as Dale Earnhardt Jr., but his results were a whole lot better. It was Gordon who succeeded Earnhardt as the dominant driver in the sport in the late 1990s, and then it was Johnson who succeeded Gordon in that role.

“I thought I had things figured out,” said Gordon, who is a close friend of Johnson’s and was in attendance at the news conference. “And then Jimmie Johnson started beating me on a regular basis.”

Johnson did that to everyone — for years. His was a sustained excellence, the sort that every athlete strives to achieve. As a young driver, he dreamed of winning a single NASCAR race. He has won 83 of them — so far. One of the big questions surrounding his departure is who will succeed him.

“I’ve already picked the guy,” Hendrick said, cracking a smile. “Jeff Gordon is coming back.”

Not really. And no matter who replaces Johnson, they won’t be winning five championships in a row. We’ll never see something like that again.

This story was originally published November 21, 2019 at 6:59 PM.