DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — The vision of his true NASCAR future crystallized for Jimmie Johnson at last year’s season finale.
He climbed into his Toyota at Phoenix Raceway for his ninth, nondescript Cup Series event of the season when he spotted them on pit road, the corporate bigwigs on their way to a suite where Johnson should have been schmoozing in his role as team owner, rather than taking the wheel for a meaningless race.
The pull of driver versus owner responsibility Johnson had wrestled with for two years at last had a decisive winner.
“I still want to be behind the wheel,” Johnson said, “but it’s really … I need to come here with a different agenda.”
Johnson stayed true to tightening his commitment at Legacy Motor Club, and now he’s the majority owner after an offseason restructuring in which a private equity firm bought into the Cup Series team. He’s Legacy’s final boss, and yeah, the 49-year-old seven-time Cup Series champion — inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame last year — still knows how to turn a fast lap, locking himself this week into Sunday’s Daytona 500 via Wednesday night’s time trials.
“It’s a big weight lifted off, to say the least,” said Johnson, who will start 40th in the 41-car field after finishing 19th in the second of Thursday night’s second of two qualifying races.
Don’t worry, there’s still quite a load for Johnson the businessman to handle in the boardroom.
The overhaul at the top, which included bringing Knighthead Capital Management aboard, is all part of Legacy’s plan to make the leap this season into respectability.
It’s been an arduous grind into relevancy since Johnson came aboard ahead of the 2023 season. Legacy has no wins, just two top-five results and 13 top-10 finishes in two years under that branding. While no one expected Johnson to drive like a champion in his few spot starts each season, his nine starts in 2024 where he failed to finish better than 26th surely aided in his push to kick himself upstairs full-time.
Johnson scaled back to two races this season, with only the Coca-Cola 600 on Memorial Day weekend in late May left on his plate. As for how much time Johnson the owner will spend at the track, he said it depended on “demand and need.”
“What’s been interesting in this journey so far is I have been much more focused on business (operations), on revenue, on sponsorship, that I ever did on, or thought on, the competition side,” Johnson said. “We’re really catching our breath here at the revenue side, much more under control. I do know that I want to get deeper into the competition side, and I believe that’ll have me at the track.”
Legacy, a Toyota team, this season will field two full-time cars: the No. 43 for Erik Jones and the No. 42 for John Hunter Nemechek. Neither driver made the Cup Series playoffs last season, when Jones was 28th and Nemechek was 36th.
“Erik is that steady, calm thing for us,” Johnson said. “Erik has been so patient with the organization, going through different ownership changes and promises about making things better. We feel a deep obligation towards him to get it right.”
Johson said of Nemechek: “As far as he’s concerned, in his first year with us last year, we didn’t have our act together in our obligation to John Hunter.”
Johnson did his part for the third straight Daytona 500 to land a big-time — like, really, really big — partner for one of the Legacy cars. After working with rock bands Creed and Guns N’ Roses each of the past two seasons, Johnson’s paint scheme in the No. 84 Toyota for the Daytona 500 was inspired by retired NBA great Shaquille O’Neal’s career.
Johnson skipped NASCAR’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony for the class of 2025 last Friday to shoot hoops and promote his car and the Daytona 500 at a carnival-themed Super Bowl party thrown by O’Neal. Johnson and O’Neal ripped the cover off the car with cameras on them — good luck getting “Entertainment Tonight” to Daytona — and engaged in a free-throw shooting contest.
Hey, even the good times come with their own trials, like trying to get Shaq into the car.
“We couldn’t get his shoulders through the car, he’s so wide,” Johnson said, laughing. “He actually found a way in, but I had to pull him out. I was hanging onto his foot trying to rip him out of there.”
Johnson won his seven Cup Series titles in 19 full-time seasons for Hendrick Motorsports over the past two decades, competed in the open-wheel IndyCar Series in 2021-22, then returned to NASCAR on a part-time basis after becoming an owner of Petty GMS Motorsports, which soon after became Legacy Motor Club.
No matter the ride, Johnson will have a shorter work commute this year. He has been living in Britain for more than a year, but the California native will return to Charlotte, North Carolina, to be hands on in his larger role with Legacy. His wife and two daughters will follow at the end of the school year.
And after some false starts, the final curtain seems poised to finally drop on Johnson’s racing career behind the wheel.
“With my new position, it’s becoming much harder,” he said, explaining that while “staying focused on the growth of the team, our partners, prospects, OEM (original equipment manufacturer), management, drivers, it’s really tough to give the driving piece a chance right now.”