Racing Beat
Cale Yarborough no longer stands alone now Jimmie Johnson, with his Cup championship win in November, stands alongside the legendary NASCAR racer as the only men ever to claim three consecutive titles in NASCAR's premier division. Johnson's feat came 20 years after Yarborough retired and immediately brought comparisons to the Hall of Famer from Yarborough himself. I see a lot of me in Jimmie, and his driving style is a lot like my driving style was, Yarborough says. Jimmie is a dedicated driver and has a lot of dedi-cated competition he's running against. What it takes to run races and win cham-pionships is having that dedication and determination to get it done. Johnson is honored simply to be mentioned in the same breath as Yarbor-ough. To find my name in the record books and be in the company of Cale in such an elite situation means the world to me, Johnson says. The champions achieved their glory in very different eras. By the time his storied career was on the books, Yar-borough had scored 83 Cup wins, good enough for fifth on the all-time list. Four of those wins came in the Daytona 500; he mastered Talladega Superspeedway three times (and added an IROC win for good measure), and he also scored five top finishes at Darlington, which served as his home track. Darlington was pretty good to me, Yarborough says, but I was fortunate to win just about everywhere I raced. So really I have fond memories of them all. Those were some good days. His first year of Cup racing came in 1965, and he grabbed his first career checker that same season, winning the Valdosta 100 in Georgia. Needless to say, the best was yet to come. Yarborough tallied a staggering 10 victories in both 1974 and 1978, and he claimed three consecutive Cup titles from 1976 through 1978. Aside from the wins there also were plenty of good starting spots. In fact, Yarborough snagged 70 pole positions before he was done. When Cale won the championship in 1976, he won five of the last 10 races, says Jim Hunter, NASCAR vice president of corporate communications. In 1977 he won two of the last 10 races. In 1978 he won four of the last 10 races. For those of you who don't know Cale, he was one of the most tenacious drivers NASCAR has ever had. He seemed to be able to take a car that wasn't handling very well and make the most of it, come out with a better finish than what the car might be capable of. That's a trait that both he and Jimmie Johnson seem 38 TRUCKERS NEWS FEBRUARY 2009 Historic Pair Yarborough, Johnson now share membership in an exclusive club By Scott Adamson Jimmie Johnson celebrates winning his third consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup Series title at Homestead-Miami Speedway, becoming the first driver to win three in a row since Cale Yarborough did it from 1976-'78. DRIVER DIVERSIONS Racing Beat