He decided that it was time to take control. He took the cars to the shop, and went over them carefully and got the tape measure out. He quickly knew something just wasn‘t right. It was there that he discovered that the Jacobs Ladder mounts were off on three of the five cars in his shop. It‘s something that one rarely checks when they take receipt of new cars.
With the problem fixed, suddenly Johnson found speed at the last two events of the year. Wayne was obviously relieved, and so was his car owner. “We weren‘t really in the ballgame,” Carlile says. “And to think we had the same issue all the way through. How unfortunate is that? Good grief. No wonder he was ready to pull his hair out. Even the Outlaw guys came up to him in the last two races and said what have you done?”
There may have been a few more lows than highs in 2020, but in the end Johnson was realizing a dream. “You know,” he adds. “If you‘re a sprint car racer, you want to race with the World of Outlaws. It had alluded me my whole career. I wanted to but I never had the funding or the opportunity. I drove for Pennsylvania car owners, Iowa car owners, west coast owners, and those were the hotbeds, but I never had the chance to race with the World of Outlaws fulltime.
“Todd and I just sat down and talked about it. He just isn‘t my car owner; he is like my best friend in the world. He does so much for me and my family. I don‘t go more than a day or two without talking to him and it‘s not always about racing.”
Wayne has now firmly entered a new world. T-shirt sales are critical to survival, and he marvels at the volume he does given his current status in the series. It is a different marketing scene as well, and he understands that today it isn‘t just a matter of your racing record, but how you get your name in front of consumers. One person who has helped in this department is Sara Sexton, his girlfriend of four years. It was her idea to launch the Wednesdays With Wayne podcasts and, contrary to his expectations, it has become a hit.
“Sara ramrodded that,” Johnson says. “Because she is internet savvy. I said, as long as you do all the work that is fine with me, we‘ll do it. There have been some hiccups along the way, but I think they have turned out to be really good. She is really proud of that. We have enough listeners now that it is on Apple‘s data base. I don‘t know how cool that is but it seems pretty cool to me.”
At present, Johnson is just anxious to get through the winter and get back to racing. He does odd jobs here and there, buys and sells equipment, and to sum it all up he adds, “I‘m a wheeler dealer.”
What he has been for decades now is a professional racer and that is what he plans to be in 2021. “We are going back for our sophomore season,” he says, “because we feel we have a lot to prove. We just weren‘t prepared enough as a team and we went out there thinking we would be far more competitive than we were. I should have known, because I have seen too many new sprint car teams go out there with the World of Outlaws and fail. Your freshman year you have to go out there and live it, learn it, and figure it out. The reason those guys are out there is because they are the baddest guys in the country. They go 100 percent every lap.
“So, do I think our sophomore season will be better? Yes. Do I think I‘m going to go out there and set the world on fire and win a bunch of races? No. But, we are going to be a whole lot more competitive. I wouldn‘t be out there doing what I am doing if I didn‘t think so. I think we can be decent. Do I think if the stars aligned that I could win a race or two?
You‘re damn right.”