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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
HEMBREE: Johnson Approaching Impressive Company
NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Champion Jimmie Johnson is closing in on 50 trips to victory lane...
Mike Hembree  |  Posted March 05, 2010   Hampton, GA
A familiar sight, Jimmie Johnson burns out after winning the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Shelby American at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. (Photo: Getty Images)

Jimmie Johnson is pounding everybody else into the dirt. He might as well do it to Ned Jarrett and Junior Johnson, too.

With his next victory – and no one, absolutely no one, will be surprised if it comes in Sunday’s Kobalt Tools 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Johnson will tie two of NASCAR’s all-time greats in career victories at 50. With two more wins, Johnson will stand alone in 10th place in all-time wins with 51.

Unless everybody else in the sport suddenly wakes up or Johnson suddenly decides to retire to the Caribbean, next on the hit list will be Lee Petty (54), Rusty Wallace (55) and Dale Earnhardt (76). Petty and Wallace certainly should be considered in threatened positions this season – heck, maybe even the Intimidator himself, the way Johnson is rolling along.

The most unusual thing about this historic movement on NASCAR’s most important statistical list is that it should have been more of a strain for Jimmie Johnson to pass Junior Johnson (no relation) and Ned Jarrett.

Both men retired from driving after the 1966 season. Jarrett was only 34, Johnson 35. They were relative youngsters. Mark Martin currently is a top-five driver at the age of 51.

Could Jarrett and Johnson have stayed around longer? The short answer to that is yes. The longer answer is that it was a different time and the circumstances were markedly altered.

The sport was in a state of flux in the mid-1960s. The past was being pushed aside, and the future was pregnant with promise. New, faster speedways had come on line, and more were arriving. The landscape was changing dramatically from a sport that started on and had been dominated by half-mile bullrings.

There were other issues at play. The first half of the 1960s had seen racing – NASCAR in particular but motorsports in general – hammered by driver deaths. Dave McDonald and Eddie Sachs lost their lives in the 1964 Indianapolis 500. Joe Weatherly, NASCAR’s happy warrior, died at Riverside International Raceway. Fireball Roberts was burned in a brutal crash – ironically, it also involved Junior Johnson and Ned Jarrett – at Charlotte and died a few weeks later. Billy Wade was killed in a gruesome crash while testing tires at Daytona in 1964, and Buren Skeen was killed in the 1965 Southern 500 at Darlington.

It wasn’t that a suffocating sense of fear suddenly gripped racing and drivers began departing for safer pastimes, like skydiving or something. But veteran drivers who had risen to the top of the sport – Jarrett had won two championships and Johnson had established himself as a fearless competitor who would do almost anything to win – could evaluate things and realize that discretion perhaps was the better part of valor.

Johnson and Jarrett both raced from 1953 to 1966. Jarrett won a total of 28 races in the 1964-65 seasons, winning the championship in ’65. Johnson had built a reputation on tracks large and small, basically “discovering” drafting at Daytona in 1960 as he won the second Daytona 500 and winning 13 races in 1965, his last full season.

Jimmie Johnson has needed only half the number of seasons Junior Johnson and Jarrett used to approach the somewhat magical 50 number.

And, perhaps to the chagrin of many, there is no absolutely no indication that he plans to retire anytime soon.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEEDtv.com and has been covering motorsports for 28 years. He has written several books on NASCAR, including "NASCAR: The Definitive History of America's Sport" and "Then Tony Said To Junior: The Best NASCAR Stories Ever Told". He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.

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The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED
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