Gordon Johncock's Indianapolis 500 career in numbers. Graphic: Backfire Racing. Data: INDYCAR, Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Gordon Johncock once summed up his approach to public relations in a single sentence: “I’ve done most of my talking with a steering wheel.” He said it in 2023, when INDYCAR presented him with a “Baby Borg” to mark 50 years since his first Indianapolis 500 win. It remains the most accurate scouting report anyone ever filed on him.
Johncock died of natural causes on Sept. 28 at his home in South Branch, Michigan, INDYCAR confirmed. He was 90. Born in Hastings, Michigan, on Aug. 5, 1936, he won the 500 twice for Patrick Racing, in 1973 and 1982, took the 1976 national championship, and finished his career with 25 wins and 20 poles from 262 starts across 25 seasons.
Those are the numbers that go on the plaque. The ones that explain him are buried in his Indianapolis box scores, and they are gloriously lopsided: a win that stopped 67 laps short, a loss that was his most dominant day at the Speedway, and a sixth-place finish from last on the grid at 54 years old.
Two wins that share nothing but a trophy
Start with 1973, because almost nobody who was there wanted to remember it. Rain pushed the race back two days. When it finally ran, Johncock’s Patrick Racing teammate Swede Savage crashed heavily, and crew member Armando Teran was hit in a separate accident. Johncock, who started 11th, took his first lead on Lap 40, led 64 laps in all, and was in front of Bill Vukovich II when rain ended the race for good after 133 of the scheduled 200 laps.
That’s 332.5 miles: a 500 that didn’t go 500 miles, but ran well past the halfway mark that makes a rain-shortened race official. There was no party. The Victory Banquet, one of the Speedway’s most dependable traditions, was canceled, so after visiting Savage in the hospital, Johncock and his crew marked the win with hamburgers at a Burger Chef.
Nine years later, he got the other kind of 500. Starting fifth, Johncock took the white flag with Rick Mears, the 1979 winner, closing fast. Mears tried to pass into Turn 1; Johncock covered it. Then, in Turn 3, Johncock dropped to a line he later admitted he had never used there, because running that low was the only way to stay flat on the throttle. The car hit a bump, stepped up the track and handed Mears one more run. It wasn’t enough. Johncock won by 0.16 of a second, a record margin at the time and still the seventh-closest finish in 500 history.
The Turn 3 call is the part worth studying. A 500 is effectively hours of learning exactly where the car will go when it matters, so drivers almost never experiment on the final lap. Johncock trying an untested line tells you how little he had left over Mears; the bump that nearly undid him tells you why nobody experiments. At 190 mph, 0.16 of a second is roughly 45 feet. That’s how much the gamble left him.
His best day at Indy was one he lost
Johncock led 339 laps at Indianapolis across 24 starts, 15th on the all-time list. His two winning races account for just 121 of them. His biggest single haul came in 1977, when he led 129 laps and was ahead of A.J. Foyt with 16 to go before the crankshaft broke. Foyt went on to win his fourth 500. Johncock was classified 11th.
Put another way: more than a third of all the laps Johncock ever led at Indianapolis came on a day he didn’t finish. Add thirds in 1976 and 1978 and fourths in 1966, 1974 and 1980, and his eight top-five finishes describe a driver whose two wins undersell how often he was in position for more.
One more quirk: for a driver with 20 career poles, Johncock never started the 500 from pole. He started second twice, in 1975 and 1976.
Last on the grid at 54
Johncock’s Indianapolis career didn’t end with a farewell lap so much as a series of false endings. He retired during the first week of practice in 1985 and spent that race working for the IMS Radio Network. He was back in 1987 as the replacement for the injured Jim Crawford, finishing 22nd.
Then came 1991. Johncock, 54, started 33rd, the last spot in the field and the one that Bump Day pressure was built around, and drove to sixth. That’s 27 positions gained by a man who had already retired once and who had made his debut in a very different sport a quarter-century earlier. His last 500 came in 1992 and ended after 60 laps with engine failure, in 29th.
A career that crossed eras
That debut came in 1965, in a front-engine roadster. Johncock finished fifth as a rookie in a race where five first-timers finished in the top nine, and he won for the first time nine races later at the Milwaukee Mile. He became one of the last living drivers to have raced both front- and rear-engine Indy cars, which means his career straddled the biggest architectural change the 500 has ever seen.
From 1967 through 1969 he also ran his own team, when he and Foyt were the sport’s only owner-drivers, and won six races in that span. Owner-driver is a brutal job description: payroll, parts and sponsors during the week, and no excuses on race day. Johncock made it pay.
He had a stock car side, too. Johncock made 21 starts in NASCAR’s top division, including three Daytona 500s, and 1973 was his busiest year in a stock car: he qualified fifth for the Daytona 500, won a pole at Atlanta and finished fourth in the Firecracker 400 at Daytona. That same season, he won Indianapolis.
A different job
After his second retirement, Johncock went home to his timber business in South Branch, about 200 miles north of Detroit, and largely stayed there. He seldom returned for the 500, and INDYCAR noted that some of his employees were surprised to learn he had raced at all. His two winner’s plaques hung in the living room alongside artwork of the 1982 finish, that race’s checkered flag and a mounted deer head, which is about as Michigan as a trophy wall gets.
“It was a job I used to have,” he said of racing. “Now I have a different job.”
Johncock was inducted into the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame in 1997 and the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1999. His death comes days after that of Jigger Sirois, another longtime Indianapolis figure, who died at 91.
What to watch next May
Johncock’s 24 starts in the 500 are tied with Johnny Rutherford and Scott Dixon for fifth all time. Dixon is set to drive the No. 6 for Arrow McLaren in 2027, so if he takes the green flag next May, he moves past both. It’s a fitting handoff: Dixon has built a career on letting the steering wheel do most of the talking, too.
Johncock is survived by his wife, Sue; daughters Patsy, Pamilee and Peggy; sons Gordon Jr. and Wally; stepdaughters Traci and Valerie; 12 grandchildren, 17 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.
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