1,000 Greatest Drivers: Dick Johnson

The first of two drivers with scatological names who I will cover this month.

While Supercars drivers continue to receive a great deal of respect, it seems like the Australian touring car drivers who predate the Supercars era don’t get enough attention. I realize and understand that Supercars is more prestigious than its predecessor, the Australian Touring Car Championship, for a variety of reasons. The fields are deeper, the schedules are longer, and the two Australian touring car marquee races, the Bathurst 1000 and Sandown 500, regularly appear on the Supercars schedule while in Johnson’s day, those races either counted towards other championships or were standalone races. A lot of the Australian drivers’ legacies from this era came in various other touring car series that no longer exist, so that means the drivers from this era look less impressive than they actually are. It doesn’t help that Johnson’s record in my touring car model is significantly weighed down by his late-period seasons in the ‘90s when he had vastly more teammate comparisons than in his prime years, which makes him look substantially worse than he was, which is very similar to what happened with Mario Andretti (who has a below-average rating in my open wheel model because of those late-period CART years where he was destroyed by his son and Nigel Mansell) and Darrell Waltrip (who has an abysmal rating in my stock car model because those years he was dominated by Spencer ended up having way too much weight…) Nonetheless, if you look at Johnson’s level of dominance, particularly 1981 when he led 208/289 laps and 1989 when he led 403/485 laps, you’ll quickly realize he was one of the best drivers in the world in those years and I rated him ahead of F1 championship contenders several times. I actually rated him in the top five for 1989 over that year’s F1 champion Alain Prost, who I left off, but I don’t think I was wrong to do so. I know he’s considered an icon in Australia, but he didn’t quite become an international icon to the same extent as Marcos Ambrose, Shane van Gisbergen, and Scott McLaughlin because they all won major league races in other country. I probably would say all three of those guys were better than him myself, but despite his mediocre NASCAR career, Johnson was close. He was definitely close.