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Veteran Racer Wayne Johnson

One thing he knew for certain was that he wasn‘t going to go back and chase ASCS points. “I enjoyed it,” he says, “and it is a great series. As a local guy around Oklahoma City, it gave us an outlet to show off our talents. They were really good to me for a really long time.”

The decision, as audacious as it seemed to some, was to compete with the World of Outlaws. Todd, Kelly, and I crunched numbers, and we thought we could run for more money. And we have. We had a nice team with ASCS, and we had fulltime help working on the car, but with the kind of money car owners are spending today this was the best spot for us. Like any business, you want to go where the most money is to be made and that‘s the World of Outlaws.”

Carlile had come to the same conclusion, but what may have tipped the balance a bit was his understanding that this was a dream his driver harbored for some time. “He has been wanting to race with the Outlaws forever. I think he had some deals put together to do that and they never turned out. Going 360 racing was something I wasn‘t interested in anymore and neither was he. He had been around there forever and it was time. My situation is such that I could help, so I said let‘s do it.”

Make no mistake about it, Johnson knows how fortunate he is to have a benefactor like the Carlile‘s.

In 2020, as noted above, Johnson was the Kevin Gobrecht Rookie of the Year, but he was hardly satisfied with his performance. “We stunk up the place last year,” he says without hesitation. “This was the first year that I could remember where I didn‘t win a race.” His owner knew it was going to be a struggle, but was surprised that it turned out to be such a stiff challenge.

There are a whole host of reasons to explain the year.

The bottom line is that Johnson discovered that racing with the Outlaws really required major adjustments. “It was like going from the minors to the pros,” he says. “It‘s not just in the car and the guys you are racing against, it is also the speed of the game. You unload, you qualify at 6:30, run your heat race at 7:15, by 9:30 you are running the feature and you are out of there. So, it is a matter of three or four hours and that is all the time you have to think about making adjustments for the night. With ASCS it was just a slower process, and you had a lot more time to think about what you wanted to do.”

On top of all of that is the task of figuring out how to make the right tweaks at unfamiliar places, and against veteran teams with years of experience.

Johnson feels that many, in particular those at an arm‘s length from the actual competition, have no idea how hard it is to find your way. “In ASCS, if you were struggling a little bit and you walked over and asked for help people would be honest with you,” he says. “Because they want to get you up to speed to get you out of the way. I‘m going to tell you right now you can‘t ask any of these guys who are on the road for help. They won‘t tell you crap, and it goes back to the fact that this is how they feed their families. They aren‘t going to help you, but they also aren‘t going to tell you anything that messes you up.”

Johnson admits that one might think that he wouldn‘t have needed help given how long he has been in the game. The truth is he did but, even worse, he couldn‘t really pinpoint the problem he was facing. The easiest answer, and one the public was more than ready to offer, was that he was 49 years old.

As a part of a little soul searching, Wayne thought, “I have done this for a long time,” he reflected. “I have won a preliminary night at the Knoxville Nationals, I have won at Volusia, and I have won all of these races. Yes, it is age a little bit, I‘m not going to lie about that. I‘m not nearly as aggressive as I was 20 years ago. But I wouldn‘t be here doing what I am doing if I didn‘t think I could be competitive. At that level, when you‘re stinking your morale goes down, your team gets down, and you start thinking you can‘t do this anymore. You‘re saying to yourself, I won eight races last year and now I can‘t win a single race.”

At first Johnson blamed the tires. He couldn‘t seem to find grip and knew that that was a relatively common complaint among several teams. He even had his friend Shane Stewart take over at Cedar Lake, Wisconsin. Yes, there was a problem Shane surmised, but the nature of the malady was still a mystery. Wayne hired some high profile help, but that didn‘t change the results either. It was hard not to be at rock bottom at such a time, but veterans understand that this is where you just have to go back to square one.