GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

Superstar driver, ferocious team leader, canny businessman, it didn’t matter: Junior was always true to what he was and where he came from

NASCAR record-setter Junior Johnson

Maybe it’s too early to examine such a figure as Junior Johnson. Maybe, this close to his passing, he deserves the grace of obituary, not the parsing of biography. But it isn’t often that an entire generation expires with quite such definition, such a pronounced click, as what we knew and what we were flip to something else. And I think that for many a motorsport-besotted American boomer, especially those of the life I came from – the struggling Appalachian farmers, the Southern rural poor and small-town working class, that one-time core of the NASCAR faithful – the click lands with a gut-wrenching finality.

Yet it was a voice entirely alien to this scene that brought Robert Glenn Johnson Junior to the larger world, just as his driving career was ending. In 1965, Johnson took a record-setting 50th win in NASCAR’s premier Grand National series. In that same year Esquire – publisher of Hemingway and Steinbeck – profiled Johnson and his sport, then virtually unknown outside the Southern heartland.

The profile was by equally unknown New York journalist Tom Wolfe (well before The

Right Stuff). Granted, he was originally from the South, but his was the genteel Virginia Old South, not the moonshine-drinking, ’coonhunting, mountain South of Ronda, North Carolina, where Johnson was born in 1931. Wolfe knew motor racing not a jot; he didn’t even drive. So he wrote about the people instead, about Junior, his life and the culture that produced him, and he went at it like a weasel on coke.

The story was titled The Last American Hero

is Junior Johnson. Yes! and it quickly became an exemplar of New Journalism: brash, brisk, expressive, and the primer for us pseudoliterary journos who followed. Neither Johnson nor NASCAR would be the same again. Junior later said: ‘He done more for me than anybody; he done more for NASCAR than anybody.’ The buzz even inspired a 1973 Hollywood film, and NASCAR’s appeal expanded far beyond its previous regional base.

Of course, we regionals were hardly Esquire readers, but we already knew Junior was the period’s archetypal stock-car driver. His education ended with primary school; he had run Daddy’s corn liquor from adolescence and had done a short prison stretch for it. Although they’d only nabbed him operating the still, he’d forever insist; nobody ever caught him on the road. He’d placed second in his very first race, in 1949, straight – as Junior told it – from ploughing barefoot behind a mule.

Like most of NASCAR’s whisky-running founders, Johnson was determined and resourceful. The claims that he invented drafting, or slipstreaming, are likely correct. That he invented the bootleg turn, likely not. Prize money meant more than championships back then, though, and Junior never won a title. But he won six as a team owner after his 1966 driving retirement, and his 139 race victories is still the third-highest total. He also pioneered NASCAR tobacco sponsorship but, unlike Colin Chapman in F1, he brought enough of it for three decades of an entire headline series, the Winston Cup.

Also like his compatriots, Junior was no saint. He’d spin you out in a heartbeat if he felt the need, and he took a hard line with his drivers. W hen one radioed for a pitstop because the car was ‘loose’, his reply was direct. ‘You bring that car in,’ Junior replied, ‘and I’m going to break the windshield with a hammer and strangle you.’ The driver stayed out, and won.

But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t give a chance to drivers whom other teams had cast aside, and he always had time for fans and working hacks. Through it all, as we say back home, he never forgot where he came from, nor did he sacrifice his dignity. In Tom Wolfe’s first interview for Esquire, Johnson ‘didn’t want you to think we was all [just] bootleggers who didn’t have no sense’.

Junior Johnson retired for good to Ronda in 1996, did his legendary country massbreakfasts for any and all, campaigned vigorously for Obama twice, and thoroughly enjoyed life until Alzheimer’s intervened a few years back. His death in December 2019, aged 88, felt like a sad changing of the guard. The old, distinctive NASCAR of the poor rural South was truly gone, replaced by the rich, urban, universal NASCAR, of nowhere in particular. And we’re all poorer for it.

‘He was tHe period’s arcHetypal stock-car driver; He Had run daddy’s corn liquor from adolescence’

Top left

Junior Johnson, on right, celebrates winning the 1960 Daytona 500 NASCAR race wth car owner Ray Fox. He was driving a 1959 Chevrolet.