“I’m the greenest rookie there’s ever been in an IndyCar because I don’t have a background in formula cars, single-seaters,” Jimmie Johnson told The Race ahead of this season.
“Every time I’m in the car, I think it’s an opportunity to see me improve.”
Improvement hasn’t always happened in Johnson’s short IndyCar career so far. We’ve seen a lot of spins and off-track moments, but how you interpret that depends on how you feel about Johnson’s IndyCar foray.
Some will look at this as Johnson – not a prolific road course racer in NASCAR – having his first season in one of single-seater’s most competitive series globally and think to get within a second or so of the best that championship has to offer has been mightily impressive.
Others look at Johnson’s results – usually outside of the top 20 or just inside it – as a stain on the legacy of a seven-time champion who dominated NASCAR’s top series at a time it was designed not to be won in such a way owing to its playoff championship format.
Whichever camp you’re in, this weekend’s Texas IndyCar race offers something of a return to familiarity – an oval, for the first time in Johnson’s single-seater career – and that has led to raised expectations. Especially given Chip Ganassi Racing’s form at the venue.
But the fact he hasn’t mastered the feel for the car on road and street courses means there are still doubts that Johnson can be instantly competitive on ovals.
With so much room for debate, it seemed the perfect time to ask The Race’s writers what they believe Johnson can do in Fort Worth this weekend.
Texas is closer to Johnson’s comfort zone
Matt Beer
When this article was mooted, some of my colleagues responded with an air of ‘but why should things be dramatically better for Johnson just because he’s on an oval?’
I see their point. It is a very simplistic view to think not turning right and not having to brake will cure all the ways in which Johnson still looks far from on top of Ganassi’s IndyCar.
And it’s not like he was at his peak on ovals either in the twilight of his NASCAR career.
And while I often think of Kurt Busch’s brilliant sixth place at the 2014 Indianapolis 500 as an example of what a NASCAR regular can achieve in an IndyCar on an oval, that was in an era when the IndyCar tech package was easier to acclimatise to for non-regulars and at an event with ample practice time.
So far, so many reasons why there won’t be a Johnson miracle.
But also, it’s entirely fair to argue that Texas Motor Speedway is much closer to Johnson’s career comfort zone than anywhere he’s been in an IndyCar so far. Most tracks he’s been learning from scratch. At Texas, he has seven NASCAR Cup wins.
Being in such a well-sorted car from Indy specialist Andretti Autosport helped Busch star in the 2014 500. Johnson’s driving for the Ganassi team that’s won three of the last five Texas IndyCar races.
I really, really want Johnson to get some degree of success from his incredibly bold and admirable IndyCar adventure. Not even wins, just to look genuinely on top of the car and capable of being on the pace. The odd decent race laptime aided by circumstances or occasional appearance on the cusp of the top 20 not cast adrift at the back isn’t anywhere near enough to count as respectable for a genuine modern motorsport legend.
Texas offers a little glimmer of hope. But perhaps I should be looking at it another way: if Johnson looks out of his depth in an IndyCar at Texas, it’s a clear sign this is never going to be a success.
Ovals might come with bad habits
Glenn Freeman
I have a nagging feeling that whatever isn’t clicking for Johnson in an IndyCar won’t be magically fixed by removing the need to turn right.
Johnson’s decision to take up single-seater racing after his epic NASCAR career was very cool, and he deserves massive respect for trying something brand new rather than putting his feet up and enjoying the good life as a US racing icon.
But I have higher hopes for ex-Formula 1 driver Romain Grosjean at Texas than I do for Johnson. Grosjean is coming in with no oval racing baggage. He’s learning from scratch, while Johnson has to forget almost all of what has come naturally to him for decades.
Plus, we have to consider their respective ages. Grosjean is 35, Johnson is 46. Johnson’s decline as a driver was evident over his final seasons in NASCAR. The man who was once an unstoppable championship-collecting force didn’t win a race again after 2017.
So even if he gets the hang of IndyCar racing on ovals, how high can the ceiling really be? I hope I’m wrong and this weekend proves to be a magic bullet for Johnson. I just don’t see much evidence that it should be.
Johnson can win – but needs one key thing to go his way
Jack Benyon
Cautions! That’s how Jimmie Johnson can win at Texas.
Whatever any of my esteemed colleagues, members of the media, fans or team members say, Johnson is good enough to win at Texas. He’ll almost certainly have the key element of the equation – a fast car; Ganassi has won three of the last five races there – and he has the fundamental talent on an oval to get things done.
One area he absolutely doesn’t have the feeling for yet, on road and street courses at least, is in- and outlaps, or at least doing them at an elite level.
Johnson at St Petersburg season opener
Best out-lap: 25th fastest, 1m00.9233s (+3.5936s to race best)
Best in-lap: 24th fastest, 1m02.0758s (+4.0355s to race best)
In- and outlaps are key for IndyCar, especially at tracks where it’s hard to overtake (such as Texas) and on ovals where the car is difficult to stop. Pitlanes are usually cramped and at Texas your first corner at speed is the sketchy Turns 3 and 4 section.
Unless there are cautions that allow him to negate the time lost getting in and out of pit road, he has very little shot at the win. But put the right car on long green flag runs in his hands and I have every faith he’s a top-10 contender at least. Maybe even a victor.
He’s not as comfortable in the car as Scott McLaughlin was when he scored a podium last year, but he has seven NASCAR championships under his belt and knows how to race an oval.
He needs more practice to be a win threat
Sam Smith
Surely there hasn’t been a driver in recent times that the neutral enthusiast wants to see succeed more than Johnson.
He’s got thousands of fans, and probably even many seasoned observers rooting for him in IndyCar. But a year into his odyssey, it’s hard to see much discernible progress on evidence so far.
Last year it was clear that Johnson was struggling to get the tyre temperatures up, and he was making the most mistakes when the tyre went off.
Obviously that won’t be of consequence on ovals but he still has to find the limit and that takes not only inherent skill and feel, which he plainly has in abundance, but also practice and time.
I really hope I’m proven wrong but I can’t see how he can get into meritorious contention for a shock win at Texas – or anywhere else in the short-term for that matter.
He’s unlikely to leave the back of the pack behind
Josh Suttill
You need confidence and you need consistency to be successful on IndyCar’s ovals and Johnson has displayed very little of either since he first strapped himself into an IndyCar.
While he’ll have all the tools he needs to succeed with a stellar Ganassi package, I can’t see Johnson leaving the back of the field scrap behind. Perhaps a series of well-timed cautions or incidents for others would yield a top-10 but I can’t see him having the big performance swing that would be needed for him to secure that result.
And with just four different oval venues on the calendar, there’s hardly that much time for Johnson to acquaint himself with what driving an IndyCar around them is like. But the biggest problem is not his lack of experience – as I fully suspect fellow oval rookie Christian Lundgaard to be super-fast – but his IndyCar track record so far.
I’d love for Johnson to succeed after a painful 2021 but I can’t see a good result in anything but fortuitous circumstances, in what I believe will be the year that ends his IndyCar experiment.
The oval expert’s view
JR Hildebrand
If I try to put myself in Jimmie’s shoes, my aim for Texas is to achieve a sense of natural comfort and connection with the car in all phases of the event – practice, qualifying, and race – so that I can come out the other side really knowing what execution in each of those phases feels like.
He might find it because he actually stomps a qualifying run and cements that complete experience or by more sporadically having micro-experiences through the weekend that click.
That feeling, though, once you have it, once you’ve been able to attach what the car is doing to what you are doing and how you’re thinking about it, is very sticky.
When it comes to oval racing in IndyCar, a good car certainly accounts for more overall performance simply because the driver is making fewer critical inputs, and you get a lot more reps.
So there are definitely more components of performance that are lined up for him at Texas than there have been at the road and street courses.
But ultimately finishing in the top five there, for the sake of argument, still tends to depend on executing at an elite level a lot of little things – from having great inlaps to just knowing, by your innate feeling of it, what the car can tolerate lap to lap, corner to corner, stint to stint, and not have the process of tapping into that be too mechanical or bandwidth-consuming.
We were all very impressed with Scott McLaughlin finishing second at Texas last year and Johnson can certainly look to that performance by a recent rookie as inspiration.
Can he keep himself at the front if he’s there late in the race like McLaughlin did? I would have to say yes, especially based on how processional Texas has become.
But we’d already seen McLaughlin do some pretty extraordinary things for how little time he had in the IndyCar that pointed to him being able to access that innate feeling of connection and comfort with what the car is doing and how you’re syncing your actions with it, oval or not.
We’ve not seen that in the same way from Johnson yet, which is what I’d be looking for glimmers of this weekend. He knows that feeling driving other things, it’s just a matter of when and where he finds it in the IndyCar.
