A smiling Bobby wins the Griffith Motor Co. Challenge Race at Bristol on July 28, 1962. He was driving a 421 SD Catalina.
HIGH PERFORMANCE PONTIAC: Please tell us about your start in professional racing.
BOBBY JOHNS: My upbringing in racing goes all the way back to the '30s when my dad, Shorty Johns, was running midgets. He was a racer from its earliest days, and in Miami, midget racing was very popular. But there was a second group of racers who had jalopy races. They could run any kind of race car-it just had to have a seat and a motor. That's where I began.
HPP: What was the first Pontiac you raced?
BJ: It was a '29 coupe. My dad built it up with a straight-six engine and twin cylinder heads. He took the radiator off a V-8 and put it on the coupe. From the top view, when you first looked at it, you thought the Pontiac had a V-8 in it, but it was the old straight-six.
HPP: How old were you?
BJ: I was seven years old when I started running my first Pontiac in junior races. Back in those days, it was still the kids driving-kids up to 13 and 14 years old. That '29 Pontiac was so good on those old dirt tracks-I could just outrun the rest of these guys. We raced like that for maybe one season. It was intermission racing between the regular shows. I got my first taste of the sport then.
HPP: What is the significance of the number 7A on the side of your '29 Pontiac race car?
BJ: Because I was seven when I started racing and my sister's name was Angel, Dad put the number 7 on the car and the letter A for Angel. I used 7A on many of my race cars from then on.HPP: What circumstances brought you to professional NASCAR racing?BJ: In the 1952 season-my Sportsman days-I was running a '34 Ford with a flathead in it. We won 35 of 60 races, which at that time was a record. It was pretty stout. I was in my teens when we did that. Of course, the next year I was called to Uncle Sam's Army for a two-year tour-of-duty in South Carolina. When I got out in 1956, I went for my first trip with Grand National, which is Nextel now.
HPP: According to NASCAR history, you were predominantly a Chevrolet driver from 1956-1959. What inspired you to come back to Pontiac?
BJ: In my racing life, there have been a number of different cars. We chose Chevrolet initially because it was a hand-me-down car we acquired from a racing team in Miami that crashed it. So we just rode it out with Chevrolets. But in 1960, Fireball Roberts and I were pretty good friends. There was an opening in Smokey's team for me to drive his year-old car, the No. 3 '59 Pontiac at Daytona. It was certainly a big lift for my career.
HPP: How did you meet Fireball Roberts?
BJ: I met him in the third turn of the Macon Speedway over the wall (laughter). Fireball had quite a reputation in Florida-all over in those days, actually-and I'm going back to 1952. I was still in high school. Dad and I would go up the road and run Palm Beach or different places. We decided that we were going to go into NASCAR, so we started running the Sportsman races around Georgia and Alabama. One Saturday night, we raced Palm Beach, Florida, and then we towed on up to Macon, Georgia. That afternoon in the preliminaries, Fireball and I got tangled up, and we got to meet each other for the first time. He was a pretty easy-going guy. When you crash, a lot of times you get hostile, but we hit it off pretty good there. Then later on, when I was drafted into the Army and he was up in that area racing, he used to come by my shop. We got to be fairly good friends. You don't get to be really good friends with Fireball, but we were pretty good friends, really.