The decline of Jimmie Johnson’s NASCAR Cup Series career has been one of the sport’s most significant and puzzling developments of the decade.
After winning his record-tying seventh Cup Series championship in 2016, Johnson picked up the following year right where he left off.
The El Cajon, California native began the 2017 season by winning three of the first 13 races, ending with his most recent Cup Series win at Dover International Speedway on June 4, 2017.
This victory tied one of Johnson’s childhood idols, Cale Yarborough, for sixth on NASCAR’s all-time wins list and spurred what has now become a career-long 108-race winless streak.
From Johnson’s rookie year in 2002, through 2017, the driver of the No. 48 car had won at least two races in every season, making this slump all the more irregular.
With growing speculation about the origin of this winless drought among the NASCAR community, some theorists point to Johnson’s crash at Pocono in June of 2017 (the very next race after Johnson’s most recent win) as the turning point in his career.
From the surface, it almost seems fair to consider this, as Johnson’s brakes failed while he was surging into Turn 1 at 203 mph, resulting in exceptionally hard contact with the outside wall.
After the collision, Johnson then climbed from his car unassisted and was later released from the Infield Care Center with no reported injuries.
While this race clearly did mark the start of Johnson’s career-worst struggles, it would be ignorant to point to this particular on-track incident as the turning point.
Further logic and research suggest that this specific incident being the first race of Johnson’s winless drought is merely coincidental, as it was part of a much larger trend that goes far beyond the driver of the No. 48 Chevrolet.
This period beginning in June of 2017 marked the beginning of a significant downturn in production for Team Chevy as a whole.
Johnson’s underwhelming finish to 2017 was well documented. In the remaining 23 races, he finished with just one top-five and six top-10s; by far, the worst stretch of his career to date.
Largely unnoticed, Team Chevy as a whole went on to win just four of the final 23 races in 2017 — the manufacturer’s worst 23-race stretch in a single season since 1993.
As it turned out, this was just the tip of the iceberg. The results got even worse in 2018 when Team Chevy won only four races — the manufacturer’s fewest since 1982.
This is far from the expectation for Chevrolet, which leads all car manufacturers with 788 total wins in NASCAR’s Cup Series. Its 39 Manufacturers’ Championships are also the most of all-time, including a record 13 straight from 2003-2015, exemplifying Chevy’s dominance in NASCAR’s modern era.
So while the microscope has almost exclusively been under Jimmie Johnson throughout his 108-race winless drought, this stretch has been even further representative of the manufacturer’s collective struggles.
As we’re starting to see, though, there is light at the end of the tunnel for the bowties.
In 2019 seven Chevys went to Victory Lane — still not up to par with what has become the standard, but an improvement nonetheless from 2018.
Two Chevy drivers have taken the checkered flag so far in 2020, with Alex Bowman and Chase Elliott bringing home the hardware for Hendrick Motorsports, which has long been NASCAR’s most dominant Chevy organization with 258 all-time Cup Series wins.
Even despite having won only two of 13 races, Hendrick Motorsports has already proven to be more competitive than it was at any point during the past two seasons.
Hendrick’s 931 laps led through the first 13 races this year rank second, and are more than the team had led in the first 13 races of 2018 and 2019 combined. HMS also leads all Cup Series teams (by five) with 11 stage wins, signaling that perhaps the best is still yet to come.
But the most telling sign of Chevy’s newfound speed has been the success of the manufacturer’s usually less competitive teams so far in 2020, such as Richard Childress Racing.
After a 2019 season that featured only one top-five and nine top-10s, so far this year, RCR has already collected two top-5s and seven top-10s.
While young prodigies like Elliott, Bowman and RCR’s Tyler Reddick have been at the forefront of this competitive renaissance for Team Chevy in 2020, it bears acknowledging that this progress hasn’t bypassed Chevy’s most recent Cup Series champion: Jimmie Johnson.
After a 2019 season that featured only three top-fives and 12 top-10s for Johnson, he has already finished in the top-five twice and in the top-10 six times, displaying a renewed capability to drive through the field and lead laps like the seven-time champion that many NASCAR fans remember.
Team Chevy’s competitive resurgence in 2020 has given the NASCAR community a sense of clarity regarding Johnson’s career-long winless drought, suggesting that win No. 84 may not be far away.
Johnson’s natural ability to overcome this type of adversity has consistently been one of the defining qualities of his NASCAR career, perfectly exemplified by the 2016 season.
The last time Johnson went through a career-long winless streak (24 races), he went on to win his seventh NASCAR Cup Series championship.
