Dick Johnson's race to the top and back

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For those who may have missed it, there was a write up on Dick Johnson in last weekends The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend Magazine.

Dick Johnson's race to the top and back


Date June 6, 2015
Frank Robson


The touring car legend never liked losing races, but it was losing his fortune that hurt most.



DJR Team Penske's Marcos Ambrose drives during a practice session at Brisbane's Queensland Raceway in late 2014. Photo: Bradley Kanaris

On a blistering summer day, a small crowd of veteran motor sport fans gathers at Queensland Raceway hoping for a glimpse of The Man Who Won't Give Up. Like their ageing idol, touring car legend Dick Johnson, the fans have completed many laps of life's uncompromising circuit. Their hair is greying, their racing colours have faded, and their genial faces suggest unexpected collisions with all kinds of trouble.

Which is probably why they're so in awe of Johnson's own long and arduous career. "Dicky is a true Aussie battler," one of them tells me under a tin shelter beside the track. "He had to do everything the hard way, but he never gave up." Other fans invoke Johnson's brilliance as a self-taught mechanic; how he took on the cashed-up factory teams in cars he built himself, yet still managed to win five personal championships.

He endured all the setbacks and hardship, they say, because he was "born" loving cars. He loved the look, sound and smell of them, but most of all he loved driving them "incredibly f...ing fast", especially when he could see Holden's "spoilt pretty boy" - the late Peter Brock - receding in the rear-view mirror of his latest mighty Ford.



Dick Johnson chats with Ambrose during the same practice session. Photo: Bradley Kanaris

In 1999, the maverick Queenslander retired from driving and devoted himself to running his famous Dick Johnson Racing (DJR) team. But his troubles were far from over. Unable to cope with the complexities of business, Johnson made a series of bad decisions that cost him his fortune, his health and his team's winning ways. For a while, it looked as though he would also lose DJR itself: a consequence, he maintains, of putting his trust in the sort of people "who'd burn your **** for tuppence".

Rescued by a recent merger with the US-based Penske Racing, DJR Team Penske (as it's now branded) lives on, albeit as junior partner in a deal with Detroit-based billionaire and former NASCAR champ Roger "The Captain" Penske. Part of the agreement was that former V8 champion Marcos Ambrose (who spent the past nine seasons racing stock-cars in the US) would return to Australia as the merged team's new top-gun driver for this year's V8 Supercars Championship.

For hours, Ambrose has been hammering around Queensland Raceway, west of Brisbane, testing his No. 17 Falcon - the number once reserved for Johnson's cars - for the season ahead. (In March, the struggling Ambrose took a break from the competition, saying he would return later in the year.) When Johnson pulls into the car park around noon, the sky is darkening ominously, a prelude to a savage hailstorm.



Johnson with his son, Steve, in early October 2014, ahead of that year's Bathurst 1000 race. Photo: Getty Images

I'm standing with a group of fans in the shade of a building, only a few metres from where Johnson parks. The fans look on respectfully, waiting for their snow-haired hero to emerge. But Johnson just sits there, staring out at the busy pit crew in their dark uniforms and the big black Penske Racing truck parked nearby. A week earlier, when we met for the first time, I was shaken by the toll Johnson's financial crises had taken on his appearance.

Now, in the sun's harsh glare, the 70-year-old looks even worse: old and haggard and infinitely weary, like a man drained of all optimism. In a 2013 autobiography, the once-dashing privateer told of the stress and humiliation of losing more than $9 million by people he trusted. "It hurt then and it still hurts now," he wrote. "I can't wait for the pain to go away, but suspect it won't. I'm sure it will eventually kill me."

As Johnson tells it, his only income since his business collapsed in 2008 comes from renting floor space to the DJR team at his Dick Johnson Museum, Raceshop and Workshop at Staplyton, halfway between Brisbane and the Gold Coast. The sprawling complex is both his racing HQ and a tourist attraction, selling, in essence, the Legend of Dick: an honest battler who followed his dreams and made it to the top.



Brothers in arms: Dick Johnson, left, and fellow racing legend Peter Brock enjoy a friendly wrestle in 1987.
"My parents were honest people," he tells me in his office above the museum. "They always taught us what was right and wrong. My father used to say, 'Tell the truth, and you won't have to remember a thing.' But honest people these days are few and far between."

Johnson admits that he wasn't feeling particularly virtuous himself on the day in 2008 when, with his company in receivership, he had to face angry creditors and offer them a reduced payout on their investments. "I left feeling humiliated and embarrassed," he says, staring at the desk. "But embarrassment was probably the biggest thing." In his recent book, Dick Johnson: The Autobiography of a True-Blue Aussie Sporting Legend, Johnson lists what he lost through his "desperate" bid to keep DJR operating.

"I'd owned a $2.1 million property, a $1.3 million factory, and I had $4 million in the DJR bank. I also had an expensive boat and two of the most famous and expensive race cars in the history of Australian motor sport. I am now fighting to save my team and my house. The rest is lost."



Dick Johnson in his driving days.

Johnson says that he wrote the book to counter gossip and speculation about himself, his family and the race team. "Autobiographies are often dull," he suggests, "but that's because you've got some 32-year-old bloke writing about his life. I've lived more than twice that, which is probably why it's a bit more interesting." Perhaps. But a more likely reason is his apparent compulsion to be brutally candid about almost everything.

Car mad for as long as he can remember, Dick Johnson was a terror of a kid who grew up in the then working-class neighbourhood of Coorparoo, on Brisbane's south side, where he and his four siblings slept in a row on the enclosed verandah of their home. His "Irish hard man" father was a car salesman, bringing home newish Holdens, Pontiacs and Buicks and letting little Richard (from the age of eight!) sit on his lap and actually drive these gleaming wonders to a nearby public pool.

It was an inducement for him to attend swim training, but despite his talent Johnson didn't share his father's dream of him becoming an Olympian. "All I wanted was to drive bloody cars," he says. "That was my passion from day one. I even loved frigging around with motor mowers. We'd pinch the engines from neighbours' mowers for our billycarts, ride to Lakeside [Raceway] on our bikes and sneak in under the fence, or [secretly harness a local man's] moped to a shed and watch him hit the deck when the rope ran out."



Johnson shows his style on the Mount Panorama track in 1991.

Johnson got his first car, an FJ Holden, at 17, rebuilt the motor and suspension and raced against other amateurs at local events. With no formal training, he got a job as a mechanic; later, after two years national service, he set up his own mechanical workshop under the family home. "We did all sorts of weird and illegal things, like putting a Holden motor in a Simca, or an MG gearbox on the back of a Holden motor."

It was in this dingy lair that he first laid eyes on his wife of 45 years, Jillie. But when they met she was with a bloke who'd brought his car to Johnson for customising. Jillie sat on a wall watching Johnson and her boyfriend work. "Her face was like a fine portrait: soft and put together with a delicate brush," he rhapsodises in his book. "And her body ... oh man, it was something else."

In those days, the shy mechanic was a bit of a looker himself, with more than a passing resemblance to Steve McQueen. (Jillie tells me later the attraction was immediate and mutual.) Soon afterwards, Johnson, as he puts it, "cut the boyfriend's grass" with Jillie and they became an item. What happened as a consequence was sad and ultimately scary, yet Johnson tells the story jovially, as though chatting to a mate in a pub.

"I was with Jillie at her parents' place," he says, "when the phone rang. I answered and this bloke [the ex-boyfriend] said, 'You're that guy, aren't you? I know, because I'm over the road in the phone box and I can see your car out front.' When I put Jillie on, he told her he was going to drive his car into a tree outside her house and kill himself. She told him not to be so stupid and hung up.

"Five minutes later there was a terrible crash. This bloke had driven his car - it was an immaculate car, too, the same EH Holden we'd worked on - straight into the bloody tree! He broke both his legs and messed up his face, and the car was a wreck, but he survived." Johnson waits a few beats. "The [ex-boyfriend's] father was a tax stamp inspector," he offers with a grin, "and after that I got visited by tax stamp inspectors on a regular basis."

By the late 1970s, Johnson's dream of making it to the top of the touring-car competition was tantalisingly close. Yet although he had his own service station in Brisbane, and sporadic sponsorship, he was still pouring everything he made into building his own cars from the chassis up. He'd tow them to far-flung race meets, camp overnight in the back of his truck, then - often exhausted from lack of sleep - come within a whisker of beating the reigning champion (usually Brock), before bad luck or breakages intervened yet again.

Compared to the ever-cool Brock, and other factory team stars of the day, Johnson was still a largely unrecognised hick from Queensland. Yet as a driver he was close to the peak of his skills. "I was doing things behind the wheel I never thought I could possibly do," he says, hunching forward at his desk. "You get into this rhythm which is a bit like listening to a symphony orchestra, and, and ... I wish to hell you could just go down the road and buy bottles of adrenalin! Because that's what motivates you to give it your all. You don't think of [crashing], only the good things ... it's a pretty special feeling."

But he yearned for recognition. "I knew I was as good as Brock, perhaps better. But there were so many disadvantages to overcome to get a level playing field."

In the museum below Johnson's office is a locked glass cabinet containing an ordinary looking rock the size of a football. Insured, he says, for a million dollars, the rock changed Johnson's life. Until the 1980 Bathurst 1000, the same rock sat on a slope above the track at Mt Panorama. It was dislodged (apparently unintentionally) by a spectator at a point in the race where Johnson, leading Brock's Holden by almost a lap, had only to keep his flying Falcon on the track to win his first Bathurst.

The rock rolled down and came to rest on the track. Soon afterwards, a safety truck pulled up to retrieve the obstacle. But before it could, Johnson hurtled around a blind corner, swerved to avoid the truck, hit the rock with his left front wheel, smashed into a concrete barrier and came to rest at the edge of a sheer drop. Johnson had spent every cent he had (and mortgaged the family home) to build the Falcon, now a smoking wreck. Television footage showed him weeping uncontrollably at the scene.

"I thought it was the end of the line for me," he says. "I said I'd had a gutful and probably wouldn't race again." But within hours, moved by his predicament, thousands of Australians began sending donations to Johnson's home: "All up, they [donated] almost $80,000. I was stunned. Then I felt a huge sense of responsibility, because I knew I couldn't let these people down."

In 1981, transformed from a nobody to national hero, Johnson, driving a new Falcon purpose-built by the suddenly attentive Ford motor company, not only beat the seemingly invincible Brock but won the first of his three Bathurst 1000s and his first Australian touring car title. Mobbed by legions of new fans, he was finally in the big league.

It was a lively club, peopled in those socially uninhibited days by lairs and wild men who partied hard and never gave a thought to themselves as "role models". Johnson and Brock weren't friends, but as the Ford v Holden rivalry became the focus of the sport they developed a mutual respect, communicated via the sort of naughty-boy banter used in the Will Ferrell movie, Talladega Nights.

Once, as they waited on the start line revving their big donks, Brock kept waving at Johnson and pointing at something in the crowd. "I had no idea what he was on about," says Johnson. "Finally, I saw that one of the flag marshal birds was wearing those old studded overalls, and her boobs were hanging out. We were both laughing so hard we missed the start and half the field went past before we got going!"

Throughout the 1980s, Johnson's fame was bolstered by his pioneering role as the first driver/commentator, firing off wisecracks as he hurtled around Mt Panorama. In 1989-90, he was pressured by a sponsor with American connections to compete in NASCAR races in the US. His results were ordinary, but he distinguished himself by calling stock car legend Richard "The King" Petty a "*****" during a race, unaware his comments were being broadcast.

"Petty T-boned me halfway through a corner," he recalls, grinning. "And I said on radio [thinking only his pit crew could hear], 'Did you see what that ***** just did!' Unbeknown to me, I'd just called their absolute champion a ***** on national television." He later dropped the f-word during a race, also broadcast, in the heart of the Bible Belt. "Once they got over their shock, the Americans thought it was pretty neat."

As you'd expect from the Man Who Won't Give Up, Johnson continued to race for years after friends and teammates urged him to retire, finally hanging up his helmet in 1999 at the astonishing age of 54. He says now it was a mistake, and that by continuing too long he damaged the racing career of his son, Steve, who joined DJR as a driver in the early '90s but never rose to his father's heights.

Dogged by claims of nepotism, Steve left the cash-strapped team in 2013 so that a new driver with sponsorship could take his place. "Steve wasted a number of good years, and it's my bloody fault," Johnson laments, scrubbing at his hangdog face. "I should have got out sooner and given him clear air." But his close friend Wayne Cattach, who managed DJR until 2000, disagrees. "I think Steve had enough 'clear air' for four drivers," he tells me. "Steve is in his 40s now, and he started racing at 17, and if you can't [succeed] over that period, you aren't going to do it, are you?"

Did he tell Johnson this?

Cattach: "Ah, various people told him. It was just hard for Dick to accept. But while Steve had an awful lot of skill, he just didn't have that killer instinct his father had. And that's what it takes."

Cattach says Johnson's famous determination was matched by an extraordinary ability to withstand pain and discomfort. He recalls how Johnson once took the wheel with a gaping, six-centimetre deep wound in his arm. "Dick was standing by the pit lane when [his then co-driver] John Bowe came in too quick and close, and the bayonet point that sticks out the side of the car went straight into Dick's forearm. He couldn't even make a fist, but he got into the car and finished the race respectably by belting the gearstick through with the hub of his hand. That's the kind of pain he can endure."

The pain of losing his mojo as a driver was something else. Johnson says he stayed behind the wheel too long to appease his sponsor, Shell, but it's also likely he was clinging to the thing he loves most in life. "I never felt afraid while racing," he points out. "But as you get older you just lose a little bit of everything, which ends up putting you in the non-competitive zone ... and you start to feel uncomfortable before a race. In the last year of driving, I just didn't feel right. I thought, 'Jesus, if I drive [as hard as] I used to drive, I'll end up crashing.' "

Johnson sources the start of DJR's financial woes to the period after Wayne Cattach left the team in 2000 to become the CEO of V8 Supercars. "I'm shocking when it comes to finance and business," Johnson admits. "Wayne handled all of that, and I trusted him totally."

In 2005, DJR entered a four-year, $12-million sponsorship deal with a West Australian finance company, Westpoint. But less than a year later, DJR's "saviour" went into receivership. "Turns out Westpoint were raising mezzanine funds that constituted a Ponzi scheme; they were using investors' money to pay off their interest," Johnson wrote in his book. "They were a fraudulent company ripping the shirts off people's backs ... I was ashamed to be involved with them when the full extent of their operations were revealed."

With only weeks to save DJR from ruin, Johnson accepted advice that he could safeguard his team's future by getting into the mortgage-broking business, which led to him losing virtually everything. In his book, Johnson wrote that Cattach advised him against the deal, yet he went ahead with it because he was "utterly desperate".

But Cattach tells me Johnson had already done the deal before seeking his advice: "Dick is the eternal optimist ... he wanted to believe. He's no idiot, but he's just not educated in the ways of business."

Asked if he blames himself for the chain of disasters, Johnson nods morosely. "Pretty much," he says. And does he still intend to keep the vow he made to himself, mentioned in his book, to try to repay the 50-odd investors who lost money when his shelf company, Nanterre Pty Ltd, failed in 2008? Johnson hesitates, perhaps thinking of his father's advice about the truth being easy to remember.

"If I can get to a point where I'm affluent enough to do that, I will," he ventures. "But don't hold your breath."

http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/d...0150605-ghfwq3