Johnson, Junior

Junior Johnson, byname of Robert Glenn Johnson, Jr., (born June 28, 1931, Wilkes county, North Carolina, U.S.—died December 20, 2019, Charlotte, North Carolina), American stock-car driver who ranks among the most influential figures in National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) history. One of NASCAR’s most colourful characters, Johnson was a direct link back to the sport’s early connection to liquor bootlegging. Though he never won a championship as a driver, he was a team owner whose drivers did bring home the sport’s top prizes. He was also an on-track innovator whose method of “drafting” changed racing forever.

The son of a bootlegger who spent nearly a third of his life in prison, Johnson grew up around both racing and illegal liquor running. He spent 11 months in prison for operating a liquor still, but he was never caught running moonshine. (U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan would later grant him a pardon for his conviction.) Spurred on by his experiences of eluding the police in his native North Carolina, Johnson began racing in the Grand National (now Sprint Cup) Series in 1955.

In 1960 Johnson discovered a racing technique that would transform the sport. While running in practice at Daytona International Speedway in Florida, he realized he could get in the slipstream of faster cars and keep up with them because of the vastly reduced wind resistance, a technique known as “drafting.” With some skill, he could then slip out of the draft and pass the leading car, which was exactly what he did to win the Daytona 500 in 1960. (Johnson is also credited with inventing the bootleg turn, in which a driver brakes and turns the car 180 degrees, but such a move has little purpose in NASCAR.)

Johnson retired in 1966 with 50 Grand National wins, the winningest driver to have never won a championship, but he began a lucrative and heralded career as a stock-car owner. His drivers, including Darrell Waltrip and Cale Yarborough, combined to bring home six NASCAR championships for Johnson between 1966 and 1995, when he got out of the ownership game. In 2011 he briefly dipped back into ownership, as his son Robert ran in the K&N Pro Series East.

Outside of NASCAR, Johnson was best known as the subject of Tom Wolfe’s landmark 1965 essay “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” (The article, credited as a key work in the burgeoning field of the “New Journalism,” coined the term good ol’ boy.) Johnson was a member of the inaugural class of the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2010.