Jimmie Johnson Is Slowly Killing NASCAR

Well, it’s happened. Ol’ ‘five time’ has gone and made it six. 

Jimmie Johnson, the most dominant driver in NASCAR’s modern era – and definitely in the conversation when it comes to the greatest driver in the history of the sport – took out his sixth NASCAR Sprint Cup Series title today, beating Joe Gibbs Racing’s Matt Kenseth (#20 Toyota) by 19 points in the overall season standings.

To say that Johnson’s win was greeted with rapturous applause and excitement from the NASCAR fan base would be way off the mark. Yes, you can compare the man’s driving ability to the greats of the sport, Dale Earnhardt Sr and ‘The King’ Richard Petty, but, barring a miraculous transformation, there’s no way known to man that the driver of the #48 Lowes Chevrolet for Hendrick Motorsport is ever going to be as fondly remembered as the two most successful drivers in NASCAR history.

Jimmie Johnson is slowly killing NASCAR.

Every win – be it a pole position, a race win or a championship title – for Johnson, decidedly not a fan favourite, seems to be driving more and more people away from NASCAR. It’s easy to see where: crowd numbers are down, and TV ratings are sinking rapidly, too. It’s no coincidence that the slide from the sport’s absolute glory days of the early 2000s has mirrored the incredible run of success that Johnson and his team have had.

Remember the days when NASCAR was damn near top of the heap, going from a mostly southern-fried sport to a legitimate national (and international: there were races in Mexico and Canada during this time) series, with billions of dollars being poured in by sponsors, everything from Kellogg’s to Pennzoil? 

I do. 

They were the first days in which I took an interest in American racing. Say, 2001 (after Dale Earnhardt’s untimely and tragic death at season-opening Daytona 500) through 2007 or eight. Those were the days when tracks were adding seating like it was going out of fashion in order to meet the huge demand of race fans clamouring to watch stock car racing, and when TV giants NBC and FOX were carving up the television market, pulling down ratings that dwarfed the NHL and MLB broadcasts. 

In that era, new tracks in locations right across the country – Kansas, Kentucky, Chicagoland Iowa and Texas – were being thrown up as quickly as they could be built, and drivers were becoming household names right across the country. Remember when you could walk into a clothing store in California, Maine or South Carolina and buy your favourite driver’s merchandise? It was an incredible time, with the sport skyrocketing into the stratosphere of popularity in a way that NASCAR founders would probably never have dreamed possible. 

At various times during those years the Winston Cup or Nextel Cup, NASCAR’s top tier of racing was perhaps the second-most popular sport behind the all-conquering NFL. If not second, then certainly giving the NBA a run for it’s money from third.

Then came the emergence of the man known as JJ and the #48 team part-owned by multi-time champion Jeff Gordon. Johnson, the former dirt racer won three times in 2002, three times in 2003, eight in 2004, four in 2005, 5 in 2006 (including the Daytona 500) and a whopping ten in 2007.

Who knew when Johnson scored a mostly unpopular championship triumph in 2006 that it wouldn’t be until 2011, when Tony Stewart in his #14 Chevrolet needed every lap of the final race of the season at Homestead-Miami Speedway to win the ultimate prize, that Johnson would take all before him in NASCAR competition, scoring 35 race wins in five straight championship wins. 

NASCAR fatigue set in. People started tuning out. Broadcasts weren’t rating nearly as well, tracks were half-empty at times and the racing, increasingly boring and nearly always featuring the hated #48 car out front, wasn’t at all appealing. The sport was sliding. Suspicious debris cautions seemed, more often than not, to favour the Hendrick cars, and conspiracy theories were all over the place.

Then, something funny happened late in the 2011 NASCAR Sprint Cup season: the sport found itself on a little uptick. The championship chase was enthralling. Unlike the man he beat out for the season’s championship, Tony Stewart was a popular champion, a guy who was far from the polished media performer that Johnson was. The two were like chalk and cheese: Johnson a big-time athlete who never put a foot wrong in public, and Stewart an old-school racer who’d get in and drive anything, and didn’t mind upsetting his fellow drivers or the media. Just what NASCAR fans like. Just what Jimmie Johnson’s never, ever given them. And probably won’t, ever.

Smoke, as Stewart is known, is hugely popular – he might be the most popular driver in NASCAR not named Dale Earnhardt Jr. – and people saw him as a sort of saviour, pegging one back for the diehard fans who were sick to death of Johnson’s lack of personality and the fact that he wins just about everything there is to win. He’s more popular on his worst day than Johnson on his best. An anti JJ, if you will. And it showed. People who I knew who hadn’t watched NASCAR in a long time were tuning back in and the sport seemed to be talked about more in the mainstream press.

Daytona 2012, when Brad Keselowski tweeted from his car during a delay at Daytona, there was another bump. By the end of the season, it was Keselowski in the #2 Miller Lite Dodge who won the championship and celebrated by downing a huge glass of beer during the post-race media press conference that went out live to millions on ESPN’s primetime flagship SportsCentre broadcast. 

Talk about a breath of fresh air! Instead of seeing a guy – Johnson – sitting at the microphone straight-batting all the questions, using a bunch of old clichés about racing and plugging his sponsors, we had Keselowski laughing and joking, and drinking beer live on national television, in a throwback to the old days. Earnhardt and The King would’ve been proud.

Alas, 2013 brought about Johnson’s most prolific season, in terms of wins, since 2010. He took the chequered flag six times, including in the penultimate race of the season at Phoenix when the championship was on the line to all but guarantee his sixth crown. Suddenly, the old fatigue had set in. People were less interested, and talk of conspiracy theories set in. It seems like four in every five negative NASCAR tweets I read or conversations I have about, Johnson is mentioned. Basically, it’s some version of the same thing: ‘I don’t want to watch the same boring guy winning all the time’.

To that end, Jimmie might think about showing a little bit of personality along the way. Just a little hint would be a good start. He’s unfavourably compared to Formula One’s Sebastian Vettel – the similarities are rather startling – who is another guy who is bad fast, but seems to check his personality at the door of the racetrack each weekend, in favour of affecting a sort of robot appearance. Johnson does the same thing. He’s boring – I yawn watching him speak. If he was more like Stewart or some of the other drivers, even the controversial Busch brothers, the public’s perception of the six-time champ might change, and things mightn’t be as dire as they are for the sport.

The problem is: what do you do about the #48’s incredible, sustained success? I don’t subscribe to the conspiracy theories about NASCAR helping Johnson win. Why on earth would they do that? They’re not idiots, and they know that the #48 in victory lane is harming the sport’s bottom line. They only need to glance at TV ratings and the great patches of empty stands at each race to understand that. 

If anything, NASCAR would be best served by be helping other drivers win. Besides, the sport’s governing body has enough problems of it’s own making: a not-very-racy new car, inconsistent adherence to the rules and a general refusal to do anything that a fan might suggest. Shorter races, less boring 1.5-mile cookie-cutter ovals…the folks at Daytona Beach don’t seem to be listening to their fans. Ask Indycar how not listening to fans has done near-irreparable damage.

Solutions? There aren’t many, short of making Johnson start a lap down every race – or maybe two, because he’s come back from some near-impossible situations to salvage a good points day this year. That won’t happen. Unfortunately, there’s only one thing to be done: wait out Johnson’s reign as absolutely the best stock-car driver on the planet, and start anew after he fades. You know it’s going to happen. As good as a driver is, it can’t last forever. It’s a young man’s game.

By then, though, it might be too late for a whole generation of fans…and perhaps for NASCAR itself.