Road to California Gold Was Paved With Dirt

Nine races, nine winners in NASCAR’s Winston Cup this season. Jimmie Johnson, winner of last year’s 500 at California Speedway as a rookie, is not one of them.

When he arrived at Fontana last year, better known for his off-road racing exploits than stock-car racing, Johnson scored his first win as a protege of four-time series champion Jeff Gordon. It was much more unexpected than it would be if he won the Auto Club 500 today before a packed house of 125,000. The race is sold out.

Johnson, a native of El Cajon, downplays the advantage of having won before on the D-shaped two-mile oval.

“I was defending champion at Dover [Del.] last year and won the next race there, but I’m not sure what that means as far as California is concerned,” said Johnson. “The cars and the technology are so different, nothing we learned here last year will be the same this time.

“Things change so fast that we’re kind of starting over from ground zero again. But I like this racetrack and Chad [Knaus, crew chief] knows how to set the race car up. We just have to find a balance with this new set-up and see what happens.”

He qualified his Chevrolet Monte Carlo a disappointing 20th at 184.734 mph on Friday, well behind the pole speed of 186.536 mph by Steve Park in a Chevrolet.

“We’re making progress. We tried a really off-the-wall setup getting started this week and it didn’t work. We’re going to go back like we were for the race last year. We went out on a limb because of the technology changes, but we didn’t get it ‘scienced out’ right.”

Last year he started fourth.

During Saturday’s Happy Hour final practice, Johnson was fifth fastest.

Despite not having won a race this season, Johnson, 27, has been one of NASCAR’s most consistent drivers. He is fourth in points, 179 behind leader Matt Kenseth, and has a remarkable record of ranking among the top 10 in point standings for 42 consecutive races, dating to the 2002 spring race in Atlanta.

“I didn’t know that stat until someone mentioned it to me a race or two ago, but I pride myself on being able to be consistent and to have that consistency in all forms of racing I’ve been in.”

Until 1998, when he got his stock-car racing feet wet in the American Speed Assn. Challenge series, his career was in off-road racing, following in the footsteps of Rick Mears and Robby Gordon.

He won six off-road championships -- three in the Mickey Thompson Stadium Truck series, two in the SODA winter series and one in the SCORE desert series.

And last year, he and Jeff Gordon joined world superbike champion Colin Edwards in Europe and won the 2002 Race of Champions Nations Cup, an annual event pitting the world’s best rally, motorcycle and circuit racers in head-to-head competition.

“From my early days riding motorcycles, consistency has been kind of my style,” Johnson said. “I guess it would be Dad’s influence and also [seven-time motocross national champion] Rick Johnson’s influence played that role at a young age.”

Rick Johnson, no relation, was a neighbor in El Cajon when Jimmie Johnson was a teenager. Jimmie’s father, Gary, was Rick’s coach when he began riding mini-bikes.

“When I got into stadium trucks, in the Mickey Thompson series, I tore up plenty of equipment and drove [team owner] Jon Nelson crazy by destroying his race trucks. But I learned some hard lessons.”

Johnson said when he was 16 or 17 all he wanted to do was keep racing stadium trucks. He never gave a thought to stock cars.

“I was amazed at being a young kid and racing against Ivan Stewart and Walker Evans, guys who were my heroes,” he said. “I was very happy where I was. Later, I sort of had my eye on Indy car racing, the way the Mears brothers did it. The stadium series had folded and there were going to be major cutbacks in desert racing.

“So I was kind of thinking Indy car was where I wanted to go but I didn’t know how to get there. Chevrolet was backing out right when I kind of topped out in the off-road stuff. Herb Fishel of Chevrolet asked me if I wanted to go stock-car racing and that’s how I ended up taking that path.”

Johnson raced two more years with the Chevrolet-backed desert truck team owned by the Herzog brothers, Stan and Rudy, before moving into ASA stock cars. The Herzogs continued to back him for two years in NASCAR’s Busch series before Jeff Gordon and Rick Hendrick tabbed him two years ago to drive in Gordon’s maiden venture into car ownership.

Gordon has been his tutor as well as his teammate and car owner.

“It’s cool to be competing with him,” Johnson said. “He’s a friend, a team owner, a teammate, a boss. He’s got ‘em all wrapped up in one. We work so well together, we drive a very similar setup, we look out for one another on the race track.”

Gordon, 31, is the favorite in today’s $5.2-million race, No. 10 of a 36-race schedule, despite a 14th starting position. He is the only driver to have won twice here, in 1997 and 1999, and is coming off a win two weeks ago in Martinsville, Va., in his quest for a fifth championship.

“I almost wrecked in the first lap [of qualifying] and had to give up on a fast lap,” he said. “For the second lap, I tried to get as much momentum as I could back to the line to make the lap a good one. Then, the same thing happened off of [Turn] 4 on the second lap, but we made some improvements to the car so we’ll be ready.”

Bill Elliott, 20 years after winning his first Winston Cup race at Riverside, may be the sleeper. He qualified his Dodge second fastest and at 47 doesn’t feel he’s too old to win.

“I think the drivers who haven’t been able to change with the times and the teams that haven’t been able to change with the times, you don’t see anymore,” Elliott said. “I know I’ve had to rethink the way I drive the race car over the last couple of years from the standpoint of how things have changed.

“I’ve tried to stay with the standards that I had in the early ‘80s and early ‘90s, but it can pass you by and you’ve got to be able to go to the next level.”

The redhead from Dawsonville, Ga., isn’t Awesome Bill anymore, but he proved last year that he’s still capable of winning when he captured the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis.