TO DAD
Story by Dale Wilson
Photos by BME Photography
Chip Johnson finally won the one race that has eluded him since 1983. Since '83, when he ran his first IHRA bracket finals, Johnson, a supervisor with the Cheerwine soft drink company and a professional bracket racer from Fayetteville, North Carolina, has enjoyed a couple of runners-up finishes and a few in the semis, but never (to him) the big one. This past October, at Darlington Dragway in South Carolina, Johnson, 38, scored.
His' 68 Nova, a small-block-powered, alcohol-fed small-tired Footbrake car, was flawless on that Sunday, October 21, and Johnson admits he was wired to the Christmas tree. In the quarter-finals, when fellow Footbrake racer Donald Barnes and IHRA official Michael Beard came up to him to talk, Chip made a prediction that he was sure he could fulfill. "I said, 'Fellas, if I don't do anything stupid I can win this race. I got the car perfect tonight.' Every time I pulled to the water, I kept telling myself, 'Stay focused.' I'm bad about getting hyped up at a race, but I never could be able to put together a string of runs like that night," he said.
Those string of runs included several reaction times that ranged from .525 to .528, and his Nova was hitting the 60-foot times dead on to the thousandth, recording five 1.510-second times. It ran itself out the eighth-mile to anything he dialed it, and in the final, after he had a .500-treed bye run, Johnson beat Pinto Footbraker Steve Alford of Angier, North Carolina. He admitted he scrubbed off three mph to take the win stripe.
Johnson had someone driving with him throughout the whole race, although he didn't know it at the time. It was his father, Art, who had died at 8 a.m. that morning --- something else that he didn't know. Chip wouldn't learn of his father's death until the next day, Monday, when his mother called at 6 a.m. and told him the news.
| Chip Johnson has been racing since he was 16. Art intoduced him to racing. Fact is, he carried son Chip to his first race when he was but three months old. Along the way, Art managed to instill a winning attitude in him, "to settle for nothing less than to win," Chip said. "He was very competitive. He bowled, he played golf, softball, he raced, and he always wanted to win. And I've always done the same thing." |  |
Art Johnson was deeply involved in racing. He started out driving, and along the way managed to gather in a lot of IHRA world records in Stock Eliminator. He won class in numerous national events, including a race at Pelion, South Carolina in a factory Stock Eliminator car in 1969 or '70, plus he got runner-up at the Winternationals race at Lakeland, Florida in 1971 to another racer who is now a hitter in Footbrake Steve Taylor of Raleigh, North Carolina. Later Art Johnson worked for the IHRA as a tech and safety crew man, then slowly got back into racing. "He had a '68 Opel wagon that ran Z/Stock and low 16s in the quarter," Chip said. "He got out of it in the late '70s and got into track promoting. He opened Thunder Valley Raceway Park in Red Springs, North Carolina, was track announcer at Dunn-Benson and for last few years, free-lance announced between the tracks at Rockingham and Fayetteville and Thunder Valley. He also announced years ago at Piedmont."
Art Johnson was diagnosed with diabetes at age 35. For the past 14 months, he lived in a rest home, in between stays at the local Fayetteville hospital. Nurses had told the Johnson family that his breathing had become shallow, but that that was somewhat normal for his condition. He was 58 when he died.
Chip left on Thursday to go to the IHRA bracket finals. His wife, Lara, and son Tommy, 9, and daughter Rachael, 18 months, met him at the track on Friday. He raced the gamblers race and got down to 9 cars there and was doing good, and felt especially good about Rachael coming with Lara. The Johnsons got up Saturday morning in their motor home, and in the first round Chip hit a .507 raction time and won the round. The rest of the race would be played out at Darlington on Sunday. He got a good night's sleep Saturday night and got up Sunday morning to race. By then, Art had passed away.
"We started racing at 2:30 and I started clicking rounds off," Chip remembers. "The car was totaly awesome. In the semis, I had a .500 and in the finals I had a .506, and going by my incremental times, I would have been dead on with a 'two.' I scrubbed three mph and won."
"I've won world championships and track championships, but I couldn't win the bracket finals. And I remember going through the finish line and my win light came on and I beat my fist on the roof of the car, I was so happy I had won that race and got the monkey off my back.
"We got home about three o'clock Monday morning, and I saw on my caller i.d. that my mom had tried to get up with me, and I figured something was up. But it was so late I didn't call. I got two hours sleep and got up to go to work, and that's when she called me to tell me that my dad had passed, that he died Sunday morning, and she'd tried to call me but couldn't because I'd cut my cell phone off because my batteries had gone dead.
 |
"Right then I got goose bumps and chills, and I cried first off. But then it dawned on me that I had help in that car at that race, because I've won nine- or 10-round races before, but I'd always have one or two slip ups with .550 lights and the other guy went red, or I'd have a .490 red light to his .470 or something like that. You know, lucky rounds. But I didn't have any lucky rounds at this race, because the car was on and I was wired to the tree. Twenty years from now I'll still think that --- I had help in winning that race. My dad was with me. My dad was in that car with me. We'd gone to the bracket finals a lot of times and he'd never won it either, and we always talked about that. He'd always pick at me --- 'You ever gonna win that race?' 'Well, I'm gonna try.' But it seems like we finally won one together," Johnson said. |
"My daddy instilled a winning attitude in me. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. It doesn't matter what we were doing, we tryed to play to win, and we played hard. We've always had that in us, to win. My wife says I'm a sore loser. We could be sitting at the house playing cards and one of us would beat the other and we'd get mad and say I'm not playing any more. I think that's one of my best attributes, wanting to win. And I got that from him," Chip said.
Another irony: Chip's '68 Nova was a car that Art had bought in 1997, less motor and trans, and together, they had dropped in a motor that Chip had. At the end of 1997, Art was tired of racing and wanted to get back into announcing, so Chip and Lara bought the car from him. "Before the race on Sunday, a couple of people wanted to buy the car, and I said, 'Hey, anything's for sale.' But when I found about him, it'll be hard to sell it now," he said.
Chip Johnson would love to run a competitive IHRA Stock Eliminator car for 2002, but more importantly, he'll dedicate his win at Darlington to his father, "because it's his win, too," he said. "Everything I've got now I wouldn't have if it weren't for my dad and my wife. My dad made me and molded me and my wife polished me. Between those two, I wouldn't be nothing."
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