Why Jimmie Johnson, best NASCAR driver of his generation, struggled in IndyCar
It probably wouldn’t have changed anything. Jimmie Johnson had approached his mid-40s career change with too much mindfulness to veer off-course on a whim, but the addiction to competition and success – for the best NASCAR Cup series driver of a generation, no less – will always be tough to shake.
One month removed from his decision to step away from full-time racing and pursue a calendar of bucket list events around the world, Johnson says he’s thankful that Carvana’s offer to fund whatever schedule of races he wishes hadn’t come a month sooner. If Johnson had been given another IndyCar contract still high on adrenaline leaving Iowa Speedway in late-July, "I probably would’ve signed it," Johnson said.
After all, he’d spent the last 30 hours taking the IndyCar world by storm, racking up pass after pass around the outside. Though he never flirted with victory and even slipped back to 11th in Saturday’s Race 1 of a doubleheader, the then-46-year-old’s took that minor setback in stride and came back in Race 2 even stronger. There may not have ever been such a stir about a 5th-place finish in IndyCar – nor a driver so elated to have ticked that box.
"I don’t think there was something in practice where you went, ‘Oh, he’s going to put on a show,’ like he did. I thought he’d do quite well, but not like that," Chip Ganassi Racing driver coach Dario Franchitti told IndyStar of Johnson’s headline-grabbing Iowa weekend. "And he was absolutely buzzing after that race weekend.
"We spoke when he was flying home, and you could hear it. That was really cool to see."
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But, as we know now, no such sponsorship offer existed. During each media availability in the back-half of this past season, Johnson would be asked some version of the same two questions – ‘What are you eyeing for 2023? Where is Carvana with its decision on its sponsorship decision?’ – and though the second-year IndyCar driver never had any clarity to offer for the second, his stance on the first, remained the same until the final week of the season.
"In my mind, I’ve been looking more to a full season," Johnson said at WWT Raceway on Aug. 19. "Certainly, that will still be the objective."
It’s what made his announcement a month ago about stepping away from full-time IndyCar competition after a single full season so surprising. But as Johnson explained in an exclusive interview with IndyStar earlier this month, though he may have appeared laser-focused, behind the scenes, things weren’t so simple.
‘What the hell did I get myself into?’
Ahead of Nashville’s Music City Grand Prix in early August, Johnson gave an interview to The Tennessean, the hometown paper. For the first time – an admission that even caught some within the driver’s tight circle off-guard at the time – Johnson said publicly that his 2022 racing schedule had him “busier than I want to be.”
"Even the IndyCar fulltime schedule is a bit of a stretch," he continued.
That line raised some eyebrows of those who caught it, but because it ran against everything Johnson had and would continue to say – until Laguna Seca – it hardly moved the needle. As Johnson admits now, it was the truth. It’s why having a contract in hand while on the ground at Iowa Speedway, as Johnson was lost in the euphoria of success, might’ve caught him off-guard and led him down a road for 2023 that he wouldn’t have wanted.
"That was one of those highs, when you’re riding those emotions," Johnson said. "You’re on this emotional rollercoaster throughout the season, and I’m thankful I have partners and a team owner that said, ‘Man, take your time. Decide when you want,’ so I didn’t have that pressure and wasn’t held to the gun to make a (quick) decision.
"Because those summer months were tough on me. My family was away in Europe, and I wasn’t with them. I was either at an Iowa test or at Watkins Glen in the IMSA car or in Indy on the simulator. All these work dates on my schedule that I’d overlooked or hadn’t paid attention to – (my family was) gone for five weeks, and I’m here alone in an empty house, and I’m thinking, ‘What the hell did I get myself into?’”
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Though nothing like the 30-some NASCAR Cup weekends he’d raced for two decades, the schedule Johnson kept this year, with 17 IndyCar weekends, more than a dozen days in the Honda IndyCar sim, four IndyCar test days, three IMSA race days, testing for the 24 Hours of Daytona and three IMSA test days – had begun to feel like work. He never meant to start another career, the plan was to chase a childhood dream he’d never had a chance to pursue.
Johnson's biggest roadblock: qualifying
Sparked by his car swap with then-McLaren F1 driver Fernando Alonso in 2018, Johnson’s IndyCar challenge was supposed to be centered on once-in-a-lifetime moments with his dad, tackling new tracks and testing himself like he hadn’t since the start of his NASCAR career. Even the humbling times – like stepping into an F3 car with teenagers in the early days of 2021 – were filled with this sense of unparalleled self-discovery for a man whose Cup career had reached a logical end point.
Johnson’s early IndyCar days were exhilarating in their difficulty – particularly his first season, where absolutely nothing was expected of him, everything was new and every minuscule achievement was a bonus for a driver who had long passed a point in his career where he had anything to prove to anyone. The race weekends were about the experience, not the results.
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But somewhere during Year 2, frustration borne out of his results – or lack of them – began to creep in, Johnson said. He’d previously been open about the fact that his comfort, confidence and pace relative to the rest of the field at the end of his road and street course-only Year 1 was where he thought he’d begin that rookie year. The continuance of that idea, of course, is that, as tough as 2021 may have been, 2022 – particularly on those road and street courses – would be more successful.
Keeping himself out of that results-first mindset, Johnson said, became increasingly tough. He had forgotten the very thing he’d told new NASCAR drivers from other disciplines during hiss two decades atop the sport:
"I kept telling Ricky Carmichael, ‘Man, it’s a five-year journey.’ It took me five years from off-road to stock cars before I felt in my heart that I had it right," Johnson said. "And right about that fourth year of Ricky trying stock cars in the Trucks series, he told me, ‘Man, you’re right.’ I’ve had this conversation with Juan (Pablo Montoya), Danica (Patrick), Dario (Franchitti) – I don’t think it matters. It’s a five-year journey to really feel like you ‘get it,’ week in and week out.
"My first reaction became frustration or disappointment, depending on the situation. I was just reacting as a competitor, like, ‘Man, I want to be faster. I wish I was better. I wish I was at the front and leading laps. I’d have to often remind myself, ‘Why am I doing this?’"
And those moments in Year 2, Johnson said, often came after qualifying. As Franchitti and Johnson said, folks across CGR could consistently see Johnson’s improvements in practices, whether in year-over-year practice lap times or a shrinking deficit to the front of the field. And his race day performance, Johnson said, was “where I’d hoped to be.” Increasingly this year on road and street courses, Johnson said he felt he could often hold his own.
"What was really frustrating was qualifying," he said simply. "I really didn’t have an uptick in performance from Year 1 to 2. I did improve, if you look at lap times at tracks, but unfortunately, the whole field improved as well. I never got qualifying figured out. The format in practice and how you use tires, it was tough for me to draw any conclusions and build any positive patterns to lead to better results.
"That part frustrated me."
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Not only did Johnson fail to improve, but when accounting for up-and-down grid sizes and the variance in Round 1 qualifying groups, it’s pretty easy to say he ran worse in road and street course qualifying during Year 2. Of the 11 road and street races run both seasons, you could make the argument Johnson qualified better at one of them in 2022: Laguna Seca, where he was 23rd out of 26 in 2022 and 25th out of 27 in 2021. Even that is splitting hairs.
The disparity is perhaps best explained this way: In 11 identical road and street races between the two years, Johnson started in front of 28 cars in 2021 versus 18 in 2022. And that shows in his average starting position in those 11 races: 23.5 in 2021, versus 24.8 in 2022. Instead of an incremental move up the grid, Johnson was slipping backwards.
"I think the second year, the frustration, at times, was more, because Jimmie was expecting more of a jump," Franchitti said. "We would see these massive gains inside the team, and Jimmie could see it too, but it wasn’t apparent to those on the outside. We’d see these 1-, 2- or 3-tenth gains in certain corners, and the way he was driving the car – his technique – was getting better.
"But he wasn’t starting from zero. I think it was ultimately too difficult for him to unlearn those habits that had served him so well."
'Why are we doing this?'
Johnson believes that Year 3 would’ve been better as he paired more consistent race-running with occasional stellar qualifying moments that could make it easier to more consistently finish in the top-15, snag the occasional top-10 and, perhaps, back into a top-5.
But as Johnson wrestled with those thoughts, he realized he was beginning to stray from his original purpose.
"The racer in me needed a couple weeks to think about this and understand, ‘Look, you’re going to be better, but at the same time, remember how you felt in the summer?’"Johnson said. "‘Remember the grind? Why are we doing this, and at what cost?’ This was supposed to be about an experience, and reflecting on that helped play a part in my decision (to leave a full-time IndyCar opportunity).
"The experience I wanted to have? I had it."
Franchitti says he was a bit caught off-guard by Johnson’s uncertainty about his future as they sipped on beers and chatted in mid-September. But when he noticed it wasn’t just a fleeting thought, the Ganassi driver coach and one of Johnson’s fiercest supporters managed to take his own sadness in seeing Johnson’s quest end out of it.
"I got the impression at Goodwood that he was thinking about it a lot, and then he seemed to make peace with it. He said, ‘I’m done. I’m happy’ and Scott and I were like, ‘Are you sure?’" Franchitti said of a weekend Johnson spent with his wife, Chani; Franchitti, teammate Scott Dixon and . "Scott was very much, ‘Oh man! Don’t leave me! Come on, it’s fun!’ But the friendship goes on no matter what happens.
"Jimmie doesn’t have to do this. He never had to do this to begin with. He gave me a couple heart attacks along the way, but I love that attitude, and I can see why he’s so successful in life."