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Johnson's Feat The Best Ever

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By TONY FABRIZIO afabrizio@tampatrib.com

The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 17, 2008

HOMESTEAD - The hauler that carried Jimmie Johnson's race cars to Homestead-Miami Speedway was parked in a tight spot between NASCAR's mobile office and Carl Edwards' trailer.

It looked no newer, no shinier and had no more corporate decals than most of the other haulers parked across from the garage stalls. The equipment that came out of it looked no sleeker. The crewmen who prepped the car were no better dressed.

That wasn't the case 30 years ago when Cale Yarborough won a third consecutive championship in NASCAR's top division. Back then, a handful of cars looked like money.

So while it's technically correct to say Johnson equaled Yarborough's feat of winning three titles on Sunday's cool, clear night, he actually exceeded the accomplishment.

Count Ned Jarrett, whose two championships came in 1961 and 1965, among those who see it that way.

"In Cale's day, there were five or six teams that were financially capable of winning the championship," Jarrett said. "Today, even though Jimmie and Carl and Kyle Busch won most of the races this year, there are still a lot of other teams that were capable of winning the championship."

There's no way to know whether Johnson is a better driver than Yarborough or whether Johnson, driving the balkier and boxier cars of the '70s, could have held off Richard Petty, Bobby Allison and David Pearson. But Johnson's achievement in 2008 is more impressive.

It's more impressive because of the size of Roush-Fenway Racing and the might of Toyota and the talent of Kyle Busch and the engineering of Richard Childress Racing and because of everything else Johnson had to go up against.

It's more impressive because NASCAR is so tough that Jeff Gordon didn't win a race this year. It's more impressive because the 25th-place guy in NASCAR - Juan Pablo Montoya - is a recent Formula One star.

No one is suggesting Hendrick Motorsports, with its 550 employees and 600,000-square-foot campus, is on equal footing with, say, Bill Davis Racing. But the competition now doesn't compare to what it was 30 years ago.

But there's more.

"Not only do you have to beat 43 guys, you have to beat NASCAR, too," Darrell Waltrip said, meaning NASCAR's rules packages promoting parity and the tricky Chase format, which severely penalizes one or two bad finishes.

"Parity was not even a word in our dictionary in the '70s and '80s."

Rick Hendrick won four consecutive titles in the 1990s with Gordon and Terry Labonte. "Not taking anything away from those years," he said Sunday night, Johnson's titles were more difficult.

Nobody's taking anything away. It's just that Johnson's feat is more impressive.

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