NASCAR: The case for Jimmie Johnson as the GOAT

Jimmie Johnson has retired from full-time NASCAR Cup Series competition. Now four years on from his seventh title, is there a legitimate case to be made for him as the sport’s greatest driver of all-time?

Shortly after the 2019 NASCAR Cup Series season ended, seven-time champion Jimmie Johnson announced that the 2020 season will be his 19th and final season as a full-time driver in the sport.

This was an announcement that had been speculated, as he signed an extension through the 2020 season back in June of 2017 and had not signed an additional extension even when Ally Financial, the primary sponsor of his #48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet, inked a deal to remain the car’s full-time sponsor through the 2023 campaign.

The 45-year-old El Cajon, California native will undoubtedly go down as one of the sport’s all-time legends given what he has been able to accomplished since making his series debut in 2001 and becoming a full-time driver in 2002 in the car he still drives.

But is there a legitimate case to be made for Jimmie Johnson as NASCAR’s great driver of all-time?

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We hear all the time that it is impossible to compare athletes to other athletes who competed in different eras, and on some level, the same holds true in NASCAR. There will never be one true “GOAT”.

But in no era did a driver ever even come remotely close to the run of dominance that Johnson had, which included five consecutive titles, and he did it in arguably the most competitive era the sport has seen. Aside of the other two seven-time champions, Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt, nobody else has even won five titles at all, much less consecutively. Additionally, Johnson won his seven championships in an 11-year span. Petty won his in a 16-year span while Earnhardt won his in a 15-year span.

On paper, that may not seem like a huge difference. But to put that in perspective, in no four-year span during these 11 years did Johnson win fewer than two titles, and it took Earnhardt four more years during his championship-winning span to reach seven. Neither Earnhardt nor Petty ever won more than two straight championships.

From a traditional win-loss perspective, that makes Johnson 7-4, Earnhardt 7-8 and Petty 7-9 in their primes.

After Johnson won five titles in a row and six in eight years from 2006 to 2013, NASCAR even altered the playoffs to feature an elimination format as a way to “level the playing field”, a change that still upsets many fans.

Since that change was made, the sport has seen five different champions in six years. Johnson did still win his record-tying title in 2016, but nobody has been dominant like he had been. Kyle Busch is the lone two-time champion during this era, winning in 2015 and 2019.

Johnson has 83 career wins to his name, and his all-time winning percentage of 12.12% is greater than the winning percentages of all but two of the five drivers he trails on the wins list.

This is despite the fact that he ended his full-time career on a 130-race win drought, which is more than five times longer than his previous long (24). In fact, he could go 23 more races without winning, and this would still be the case, and a 153-race win drought is a win drought of over four years.

He trails two of those drivers, Bobby Allison and Darrell Waltrip, by just one win. The only other three drivers ahead of him are Petty (200 wins), four-time champion David Pearson (105) and four-time champion Jeff Gordon (93).

Johnson won at least two races in each of his first 16 seasons (2002 to 2017) as a full-time driver. Only Petty can also make that claim, having done so for 18 straight seasons from 1960 to 1977.

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Does Jimmie Johnson have a legitimate case to go down as the greatest NASCAR driver of all-time? There will never be a right answer or a wrong answer as far as who is truly the “GOAT”. But it’s impossible to leave him out of the discussion among the sport’s all-time elite.

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