1,000 Greatest Drivers: Junior Johnson

I'm not sure whether such a prolific cheater qualifies as a "hero", but I understand why Tom Wolfe begged to differ.

Talk about impossible. Imagine trying to summarize Junior Johnson’s career within my 500-word limit. Obviously, I knew I would hardly have any room to mention any of the individual races from his driving career except for the race where he supposedly discovered drafting, although to be honest, I think it’s impossible to verify that he was actually the first person to discover the draft. While I could certainly gloss over Denny Hamlin’s career as a car owner since at the moment it seems like a bit of a footnote (when I cover Dale Earnhardt in a couple days, I might ignore DEI as well), but in the case of today’s #11 car driver it was completely unavoidable since his car owner career was vastly greater than his driving career. Nonetheless, I do think for Johnson specifically, it is more important to talk about the legend behind him than his individual races or stats. I can understand why the mythology behind him is a bigger deal than his actual career, but his career itself was still probably one of the top 20 greatest in NASCAR history. I don’t think he really has a claim for top 10 because the level of competition in a lot of his best seasons was really bad, but if you wanted to argue that, I probably wouldn’t be able to argue with you. I almost didn’t even list 1965 as his best season until I decided I had to mainly since it also marked his debut as a car owner.