Jimmie Johnson Defined an Era

The sponsor looked at the driver, a soft-spoken, doe-eyed kid, and asked one question, simple but also loaded: “Can you win?”

The driver, if he was intimidated, didn’t show it. He wasn’t a big name, not even in the Busch Series where he’d raced for the last two seasons with one win and a top-10 points finish but nothing earth-shattering. He’d never been handed anything, never expected to have anything handed to him. But here was an opportunity, one that could change his career if he answered the question right.

So the driver looked at the sponsor, right in the eye. “Yes.”

There wasn’t really much in Jimmie Johnson’s pedigree to suggest he’d turn into the kind of driver Hendrick Motorsports expected. He turned heads when Jeff Gordon hand picked him in 2001 for the new No. 48 team that he would co-own with team owner Rick Hendrick for a full slate of races beginning the following year, but because the move was unexpected. Johnson had only climbed into a stock car a few years early; before that, his experience was in off-road racing, far from a traditional path to NASCAR. 

So, while Johnson boldly told executives from a massive corporation that he could win, critics of Gordon’s choice weren’t convinced he would win at all.

It took Johnson 13 races to prove them wrong.

Johnson ran just three races in 2001, never finishing better than 25^th. But if the critics felt vindicated, Johnson kicked off his fulltime rookie season by sitting on the pole for the 2002 Daytona 500. He finished 15^th. He followed that up with a 28^th at Rockingham, but then Johnson began to show the driver he’d be: in the next seven races, he finished outside the top 10 just once, due to a mechanical failure at Martinsville. Nine weeks into the season, Johnson was sixth in driver points. 

And in week 10, the first win came. The second and third also came in 2002, both at Dover Speedway, where Johnson would win a total of 11 times, more than any other driver in Cup Series history. 

Johnson also set a rookie record that no other driver has been able to equal: he led the Cup Series points as a rookie. 

All that and Johnson didn’t win Rookie of the Year (that went to Ryan Newman). But he set the bar high for himself. Still, that Johnson might someday catch the one record that even Gordon would never approach, the one that sets drivers alone among others, seemed…unlikely.

Johnson would say later that he raced scared his…