ANDERSON DREAMS OF LAST ATLANTA GIG WITH BAND TOGETHER, JOHNSONS DON’T SHARE VISION

by Susan Wade    Fri, 2021-04-23 19:45

 

 

Greg Anderson envisioned a perfect last NHRA Southern Nationals at Atlanta Dragway next week.

His former mentor and fellow Pro Stock legend Warren Johnson would be out on the racetrack, going for his 98th victory, while Anderson tries to pull within one victory of the all-time class leader with a 96th and second of this young season.

In Anderson’s fantasy, Kurt Johnson, his sidekick from the early days and Warren’s 40-time-winner son, would be racing, too. After all, the Commerce, Ga., venue and property that the NHRA is selling for commercial development is just about 30 miles from the Johnsons’ homes at Sugar Hill.

“I wish they’d come out, just for old times’ sake, especially this being the last year of Atlanta. That’s certainly a reason for Warren and Kurt to come out. You know they can get [sponsorship] for just one race. I’d like to see them come out,” Anderson said.

But wishes don’t always come true. They won’t in this case.

The NHRA has invited Warren Johnson to headline the Sunday-morning Track Walk. So he’ll be going down the dragstrip only on foot.

Johnson said he would enter the race “only if they pay me.

“I’ve still got three tractor-trailers sitting here,” he said in a phone interview from his shop. “I always kept a spare in case we needed one. None of those has been licensed. That’s $4,000 to license one of those things. I have to put insurance on it. I’ve got one car converted over to the fuel-injection format. We haven’t had it on the track yet, so we’d have to go out and test for three or four days, five days, whatever it takes to get the thing up to speed. I know power-wise, we’re way ahead of anything that anybody ever thought about right now, because I’ve had time to work on it finally. So power’s not the problem.”

The challenge is putting that power to the ground, for he said he’s unfamiliar with the performance of the iteration of the Goodyear tire that’s required in the class today.

“I can still drive a car. That’s not a problem,” Johnson, who’ll turn 78 in July, said. “Whether I’d be as competitive as I was before we don’t know. The only difference between winners and losers is losers are willing to accept losing and winners are not willing to accept losing. But when you do something for roughly 40 years, seven days a week, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, you just get kind of burned out.

“It was an interesting way to make a living. I venture to say that I was in the top two percentile of all working people in the country who absolutely enjoyed what they did,” he said. “That was not work. It was just the opportunity to succeed. I don’t think I’ve got that much drive in me to do that.”

The six-time series champion won the “Unfinished Business” race of NHRA legends at Gainesville in 2019, and match-raced veteran racer Larry Morgan at Cordova, Ill., not too long ago, with a primo .011-second reaction time his worst light in six passes.  

And that’s what Anderson was talking about. The four-time champion knows Johnson still can give him a run for his money. And with Anderson recognizing that the close of his career possibly could come sooner rather than later, he wanted to wake the echoes cheering Johnson’s fame and their once-intense rivalry – or, as Johnson put it, his former protégé is “seeing ghosts.”

Anderson said, “It’s really made me scratch my head for the last three or four years that they haven’t come out to Commerce. It’s really made me scratch my head. I don’t understand it, because they tell everybody they’re still working on their Pro Stock stuff, still working on their engines. Got their cars, got their stuff, got their trucks. 

“There’s no excuse. He lives right down the road. C’mon,” he said last weekend at the Las Vegas four-wide event. “That doesn’t make sense to me. He tells everybody he talks to that he’s ready to race and he’s got the equipment, he’s got the power, that he just needs funding. Well, you live 30 miles down the road, so . . . you can do that. Qualifying will pay for it. It’d be great.”

Johnson had his reasons for not competing in the Southern Nationals: “It’d take too much time to get this stuff up to speed. Even if you started on it today, it’d still take a month, month and half, to have a car that’s competitive. I’ve never run this different tire that’s on there now. We have no idea what those are. Yeah, I’ve got those $20,000 shocks on there. We’ve got the equipment. It’s just you’d have to go and sort this mess out again. And there’s just not enough time for that.

He said, “I’ve had a few people that are interested if I want to do it, and I told them it’d have to be the right situation. You’d have to have an ROI on this thing, just like I would have to have for my side. I’m not going to do it for free, and you should get a return on it.’ If that situation ever came to pass, yeah, we’d go out there. We’d certainly put Kurt in the car, for damn sure.”

Kurt Johnson finished second in the standings four times, and he trails only Top Fuel’s Doug Kalitta as the racer with the most victories without a series crown. (Kalitta has 49 Wally trophies and has been series runner-up five times.) 

“If nothing else, Kurt should be out there. At the very least, Kurt should be out there,” Anderson said. “He works in the shop every day. I don’t know what they’re working on. They’re obviously doing something, because they’re living. They’re renting something or selling something to somebody.” Then with a laugh, he said, “They’re definitely not helping me.

“They are surviving. Kurt texts once in awhile. He seems happy, seems content. Whatever they’re doing, they’re happy with it,” he said.

Warren Johnson said his son “is of the same mindset as I am. We never went to a race that we didn’t think we could win. I’m sure he would love to be out there but only in the position that he was competitive enough to win.”

As Anderson reflects on his career, he said “I guess, in a way,” that he sees his relationship with Warren Johnson in the same light as Johnson’s celebrated rivalry with Bob Glidden.

“You know,” Anderson said, “you’d want him to be out here with you. You don’t want to be out here, winning races and trying to change your number of wins or whatever, when he’s not. I’d rather he be out here, doing it at the same time. But I guess he’s older now. But Kurt’s younger than me. He can still do it.”

Johnson knows he can and said, “If I was making money, I’d do it. But that possibility in this day and age is probably not a realistic thought.” As for Anderson being in position to tie and surpass his accomplishments, Johnson said, “Records are only meant to be broken. If he ends up with more wins, then so be it. I guess I’d have to say I was part of it, because I trained him.”

Anderson was a crew member and crew chief for Johnson during four of Johnson’s six NHRA Pro Stock championships. Johnson said, “He worked here for 12 years. He was a good employee. I have absolutely nothing negative to say about Greg. Everybody that’s ever worked for me, I’ve always told them that ‘we’re going to part ways at some point. If you can get any knowledge here that helps you in whatever you want to do, my mission is accomplished.’”

Johnson sloughed off any notion that he and Anderson have been rivals, just as he thought the media and fans hyped his competition with Glidden as more than it was.

Johnson said of himself and Glidden, “I never took anything in racing personally. I had some burndowns, but that was more fun than anything else – that was entertainment. Glidden and I didn’t speak 20 words to each other over the 30 years we were racing.  It’s not that we hated each other. We were two dogs fighting for the same bone. That was the way we made our living. We were so focused on making a living. Doing this was something we enjoyed doing. Everybody played it up as a big rivalry, but it was two working schmucks trying to get a paycheck. That’s all it was.”

The NHRA offered the Johnsons the chance to make an exhibition pass against each other during the Southern Nationals, and Warren Johnson declined.

“I said, ‘No. That’s impossible to do. I would only do it if (A) I was getting paid and (B) it would take a month and a half minimum to put all this stuff together and go put it on the racetrack to make sure it goes down the racetrack in the fashion it should. I’m not just going out there to ride and embarrass myself.’” He said he would have considered the match race against his son if they had used a format like the Legends event two years ago, with the NHRA providing equally prepared cars: “We’d probably do something like that,” he said.

However, that doesn’t seem likely. What does is that Anderson’s fantasy will remain just that. 

 

 

 
Categories: 
:::::: News ::::::