Hier mal der "Leidensweg" oder die Karriere eines Warren Johnson. Ist von seiner HPZitat von Björn Lähndorf
http://www.warrenjohnsonracing.net/index.html
Das muß sich mal reinziehen. Wenn das keine Dedication ist weiß ich es auch nicht mehr.
Ich glaube dem statte ich mal einen Besuch ab nächstes Jahr
It's ironic that Warren Johnson (WJ) considers racecar drivers as "disposable as spark plugs". However, there are those very special Platinum Plugs that out perform all others and last an incredibly long time. Warren must be one of those!
Warren downplays his own driving ability, yet he has been honored as one of: Drag Racing's 50 Greatest Drivers and also was inducted into the International Motorsport's Hall of Fame. Quite the Honor and, I might say, well deserved!
Warren is an expert engine developer, innovator, team owner, and a strategist. One of his favorite sayings is: "Outthinking the competition is what appeals to me."
A Drag Racing Star, this 68-year-old, silver-haired grandfather prefers the intellectual challenge of racing to the adrenaline rush of head-to-head competition. Warren is complex, calculating, and cerebral, a brilliant engineer/racer who is analytical and occasionally cleverly controversial. Artfully dubbed "The Professor of ProStock", that unique title epitomizes Warren Johnson the Person, the Professional, the Drag Racer.
NHRA's Record Book testifies to his considerable driving skills. Warren is at the head of the Class for Pro Stock's statistical categories for: Victories, Runner-Up's, Final Rounds, #1 Qualifying Times, Low Elapsed Times, and Event Top Speeds. What a legacy!
His Professional Racing Career spans all of four (4) decades. Warren has achieved the status of "Senior Statesman" in the sport of Drag Racing. He is also playfully known a "Racing Encyclopedia." Warren has competed in 87 percent of the Pro Stock races since his involvement with the NHRA. He has also had a remarkable 25-year record of qualifying at National Events. In a class where horsepower and quick reactions win races, Warren is the undisputed "King of Speed". He has recorded Top Speed and even Record Setting Speeds at numerous National Events.
Humbly, Warren says, "This isn't rocket science. It's about racing 1,320 feet." Well, that's being very modest. Warren also says,"Drag Racing is an engineering exercise in its purest form; you either win or lose." Very true. However, horsepower, reaction time (most races are won or lost by .0010 second or less), lane choice, and (let's face it) downright nerve, make Drag Racing somewhat unique in motorsports.
Warren's determination and relentless work were forged as a young man growing up on a hard-scrabble farm in Minnesota's aptly named Iron Range. "What we were doing wasn't really farming; it was more like moving rocks around," Warren recalls. "Growing up on a farm was a great education for a youngster with an interest in mechanical things." Obviously, that has paid off -in spades- for Warren!
Long before he became the most prolific ProStock driver in NHRA history, WJ was an unknown soldier in an army of weekend warriors. He drove his modified '57 Chevy hundreds of miles to race on obscure dragstrips while his wife, Arlene, and son, Kurt. He'd get there, change rearend gears, re-tune the car, and head out to the strip. The Johnsons won their first race in 1963 at Minnesota Dragway. Little did they know at that time that there would be many more Victories (and Records) to come. Warren's ProStock career was an accident of geography. How so?
Well, being insulated from the fuel-racing frenzy of Southern California and isolated from the stock-car strongholds of the East and South, Warren concentrated on engine development during the long, hard Minnesota winters.
In his "spare time", he took extensive engineering, night classes while working full time in a steel fabrication shop. Even so, his heart always remained in that tiny garage behind his family home in remote, frigid, Fridley, Minnesota.
Warren ran his first race in ProStock in 1971. He had driven a Camaro home from a dealership and stripped it in his driveway, towed his homebuilt race car to Indianapolis, and qualified 28th in the 32-car U.S. Nationals Event, and was promptly defeated in the first round of eliminations.
That experience taught, the not yet titled "Professor", the value of patience, persistence, and believing in oneself. Warren won his first National Event race in 1982. He won his first Winston Championship Title in 1994. It was a tough, hard process for Warren to gather what he needed in: equipment, resources, and knowledge it takes to become a real Champion.
At the start, Warren financed his fledgling racing operation by building engines for his competitors. Not an easy thing to do considering his engine-building efforts for his competition, cost him victories. But, his personal victories were starting to add up. Campaigning a wicked handling big-block Chevy Vega, on poorly prepared tracks, provided Warren the ability to experience how to handle a racecar on virtually any racetrack surface. (That will come in handy in his later races - with lots of his newly created horsepower - on [to be kind] "difficult" racetracks.)
In 1975, at the age of 32, Warren made the decision to become a Professional Drag Racer. It was a bare-bones, family business: Warren, Arlene, and Kurt slept in their truck, took showers in friends' hotel rooms, and several times had to fix their broken down car hauler. Several breakdowns happened during frigid cold spells and snowstorms in the middle of nowhere. That's where Warren's inventiveness was sharpened. At the start, Warren told everyone that, "My plan was to start at the bottom and work my way up. We had no sponsorship money, - absolutely nothing. In retrospect, I had no choice but to make it work."… And that he did!
WJ made it work first by finishing as Runner-Up in the 1976 Winston Championship Event with a Camaro he later christened "The Incredible Hulk". Incredibly, through Warren's coaxing and undying efforts, it logged nearly 3,000 runs in six seasons of extremely hard racing. He finished Fifth in the NHRA standings in 1977 and seventh in 1978. Incredible for a rookie.
Cleverly, in the years 1979 through 1981, Warren decided to switch from NHRA races to IHRA races to test his abilities to develop massive cubic inch engines and run them with completely different car/engine/weight combinations. Predictably, Warren won two back-to-back IHRA Pro Stock championships and barnstormed his big-block Camaro on the Match Race circuit. (Meanwhile, he's perfecting his engine development, chassis modifications, and driving techniques for virtually any drag racing format.)
"You have to understand how to win; winning doesn't happen by accident." Warren explains. "I needed to learn how to race." … Well, he learned very quickly.
The Johnson family migrated to Georgia in 1981 to take advantage of the South's year-round racing weather. When NHRA replaced its complex system of Pro Stock weight breaks with a straightforward 500-Cubic Inch Displacement, 2,350-pound combination at the start of the 1982 season, W.J. returned to NHRA with tons of experience in hand.
Accordingly, Warren scored his first NHRA National Event victory at the 1982 Summernationals in Englishtown, NJ defeating reigning Champion Lee Shepherd in the Final round. The fans went crazy! Once he tasted that victory, Warren's appetite for winning became insatiable. He won at least one national event for 20 consecutive years — the longest active winning streak in NHRA drag racing history.
WJ utterly dominated Pro Stock in the 1990s, winning Championships in 1992, 1993, 1995, 1998, 1999, and 2001. He has won a total of 8 Championships: Six with NHRA and Two with IHRA. Unrivaled by any Professional drag racing driver. He won over 30 percent of the races he participated in and appeared in more than 44 percent of the Final Rounds. He claimed four consecutive U.S. Nationals crowns from 1992 to 1995 and ended the decade with his sixth career Indianapolis Title in 1999. W.J. reached drag racing's last great milestone with his barrier-breaking 200-mph run in April 1997, and in 1999 WJ made history again by running the top speed at every event on the Schedule.
Mechanical wizardry and technical innovation are the hallmarks of WJ's career. He introduced the Funny Car-style roll cage to Pro Stock and perfected the five-speed planetary transmission. Studying the innards of the internal combustion engine became a ritual with Warren. He continues to fine-tune the combustion chambers and every part of the fuel/combustion/exhaust cycles a 4-stroke engine performs. All his engine and cylinder head designs are uniquely his and are extremely powerful.
When Oldsmobile engineers launched a serious drag racing program to showcase the resurrected Hurst/Oldsmobile in 1983, WJ was the person they contacted. Warren re-worked the venerable big-block Chevrolet V-8 to create a strong, durable powerplant: the invincible Drag Race Competition Engine (DRCE). After nearly 30 years, the Johnson-designed DRCE still remains the foundation of General Motor's Pro Stock engine program.
WJ's Championship string continued right through The New Millennium. He won his sixth Pro Stock title in 2001 as the NHRA was celebrating its 50th anniversary. That year, Warren won six NHRA national events, qualified No. 1 three times, and out-pointed all his competitors. A true Champion.
Two Top Ten points finishes followed in 2002 and 2003. Warren went on a Classic "School's Out" Tour in 2005, announced only moments prior to the NHRA Opening Event at the Winternationals in Pomona, CA. It was met with an enthusiasm never before seen in the NHRA Pro Stock category.
At the end of that 2005 campaign, the Winningest Driver in Pro Stock history, WJ, again returned to the NHRA trail, ready to mix it up with both the established veterans and new, fledgling Pro Stock racers alike…. They found out that some lessons are best learned the hard way!
In May of 2010, Warren became the oldest Professional National Event winner in NHRA history at the age of 68 when he won the AAA Midwest Nationals at Gateway International Raceway in Madison, IL.
Warren Johnson continues to be a formidable force to be reckoned with in NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing's most competitive class. He has earned the respect of his racing peers and millions upon milions of race fans.
As the 2012 season gets underway, 69-year old Warren Johnson still possesses all the fire, passion, and determination to win races. He is one of the NHRA's longest-running Champions. Moreover, he has found a new combination of power, ability to harness that power onto the racetrack surface, and to react to those Yellow Lights, like a "Bull to the Matador's cape". (Um,….my expression, not his.)
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