Jimmie Johnson makes surprising claim regarding late NASCAR struggles

The name Jimmie Johnson needs no introduction. Tied for sixth all-time with 83 race victories, tied for the most NASCAR Cup Series championships of all-time with seven, and one of just 22 drivers to make 700 Cup Series starts, "seven-time" is one a kind.

As has been well-documented, though, his final years have not treated him kindly. In fact, from 2018 to present day 2025, he has zero wins, and only 11 top five finishes in 121 starts, in both full-time and part-time Cup Series seasons. If you talk about his two-year IndyCar stint from 2021 to 2022, he also had zero wins and just one top five finish with one additional top 10 finish.

Perhaps the most puzzling part is just how sudden Johnson's fall from grace occurred. Not even a year before his massive, and currently still active, win slump began, he won three of the final seven races in 2016 en route to clinching his record-tying seventh championship. He even won three of the first 13 races the following season, only to never win again.

The June 2017 Pocono race is often referred to as the race that ended Jimmie Johnson's career as we knew it.

On Sunday, June 11, 2017, one week after Johnson's 83rd Cup Series win, the El Cajon, California native's brakes failed entering turn one at Pocono Raceway, causing him to cut the inside grass to try to reduce speed before slamming almost head-on into the outside wall.

Johnson appeared to be severely winded, taking a moment to kneel down at the side of his destroyed race car, before then taking a seat beside the wall. Ironically, it was all too similar to a head-on crash he suffered at turn one at Watkins Glen International, when his brakes failed entering the hard 90-degree turn, some 16 years prior.

Only that time, he climbed onto the roof of his car to show he was okay.

While Johnson was okay and "just needed a second" to catch his breath, things rolled downhill from there. He raced the rest of 2017 without obvious issue, and even qualified for the round of 8 in that year's playoffs, but the No. 48 team wasn't the same. He scored just six top 10 finishes and one top five finish with no wins in the remaining 22 races that year.

His three full-time seasons and three part-time seasons after that are no better. Following 2017, Johnson qualified for the playoffs as the 15th seed in 2018 before being knocked out in the opening round and finishing the season winless for the first time as a full-time driver.

Then he missed the playoffs altogether in 2019 and 2020. In 14 starts since his part-time return in 2023, he has six DNFs and 13 finishes outside the top 25, with the lone exception being his third place finish in this year's Daytona 500. That performance has only further added to fans' thoughts of his ultimate demise.

But Johnson has claimed that his 2017 Pocono wreck is not to blame for his late career struggles and subsequent full-time retirement.

In the eight years following that horrifying wreck, it has been a hot topic of discussion. The seven-time champion was even asked how that incident shaped the rest of his career by a fan on a recent episode of his podcast, Never Settle with ESPN's Marty Smith, but he denied this ongoing theory.

"I without a doubt disagree... I got out and had to sit down, not because the impact was so bad, but because my crotch belt was too tight. And for any man, you'll understand what happens in the crotch area with a high contact rate. People think I was having all these other issues. Sitting down seemed like a great option!"

Jimmie Johnson

Johnson mentioned that he and his team both "lost something" in his final few years, and that he retired from full-time competition simply for not wanting to continue the 38-week grind. He also said he knew he was leaving a car that was still capable of winning the championship, and considering the fact that Kyle Larson won the 2021 Cup Series title with the No. 5 team that was virtually a re-branded No. 48 team from 2020, he wasn't wrong.

Now, this could just be a classic case of sugarcoating to downplay the effects this incident ultimately had on a legendary career that, at the time, was still relatively booming. It also could be fully true, and merely a coincidence that people like us, with too much time on our hands, created as a coping mechanism.

This is the first time that Johnson has openly spoken about this topic, and for that reason, we'll probably never know the true answer, especially while he's still racing. The only person who really knows is Johnson himself, and frankly, he's probably the only one who should know.

But, the numbers and their timelines don't lie. Like all the big "what ifs" in sports history, June 11, 2017 will always be a day when people question if Jimmie Johnson's chances at becoming the only driver to win eight NASCAR Cup Series championships were truly washed away for good.