{"id":69459,"date":"2020-02-14T06:16:48","date_gmt":"2020-02-14T14:16:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/?p=69459"},"modified":"2020-02-14T06:16:48","modified_gmt":"2020-02-14T14:16:48","slug":"jimmie-johnson-weighs-post-nascar-plans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/jimmie-johnson-weighs-post-nascar-plans\/","title":{"rendered":"Jimmie Johnson Weighs Post-NASCAR Plans"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jimmie
All images courtesy Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Seven-time NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson didn\u2019t have much to do on Monday, so he took a trip to Circuit of the Americas (COTA) outside Austin, Texas, to check out the first NTT IndyCar Series open test of the year. After qualifying fourth on Sunday for the upcoming Daytona 500, Johnson paid visits to friends in the paddock and, just like the drivers, hung around hoping the rain squalls would go away.<\/p>\n

They didn\u2019t, but Johnson, who is stopping his full-time NASCAR Cup Series competition after the 2020 season, still had a good time. This is not the end of his racing, he\u2019s said, but what comes next could be anything, from road-racing in INDYCAR, a trip back to his personal memory lane of off-road racing or even races in either the World Endurance Championship (WEC) or IMSA.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m open to all other forms of racing. Now that there is an ending near at the end of 2020, those calls and texts and stuff,\u201d from teams in other forms of racing, \u201care coming in more often,\u201d Johnson allows. He\u2019s driven in circles long enough, he said, and has an interest in driving an Indy car on road courses. The new aeroscreen adopted for the 2020 season has helped sway the seven-time NASCAR champion\u2019s thoughts to the open-wheel arena.<\/p>\n

\u201cINDYCAR is an option. Sports cars. I could see a situation where the WEC series has an eight-race schedule – there\u2019s a lot of off-weeks an in an eight-week schedule. Travel the world, take my family with, school, experience the world…\u201d he mused. \u201cI could see a neat opportunity there.<\/p>\n

\u201cClearly, the IMSA (WeatherTech Sports Car Championship) series racing here in North America would be a lot of fun. Those divisions would be probably my first focus in \u201921 or \u201922.\u201d Johnson has raced in IMSA\u2019s Rolex 24 at Daytona on several occasions, with a best finish of second in 2005 and 2008.<\/p>\n

\"Jimmie<\/p>\n

\u201cIn my heart,\u201d Johnson confirmed, \u201cI still want to go back and do some off-road racing. I think opportunities like that will be around for a long time. I feel like there\u2019s probably a shorter runway on some of these other series\u2026 With that being said, I\u2019m just open. We\u2019ll see what develops over the year.\u201d<\/p>\n

A couple of years ago, Johnson traded cars with Fernando Alonso, who was still driving for McLaren\u2019s Formula One team at the time. \u201cAfter driving that F1 car a couple of Novembers ago, it just blew my mind what that experience was like. So yeah, INDYCAR is an option,\u201d once his work with Hendrick Motorsports is complete next November.<\/p>\n

As he watched the rain come down at COTA, Johnson considered the track one that he might consider for his INDYCAR attempts. He\u2019d actually consider most any road course, \u201cEspecially an F1 track. I was able to go around the one in Abu Dhabi with Fernando in a McLaren production car, which was really rad.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, at COTA, he was able to take a ride – in the rain – around the 3.426-mile, 20-turn track with Max Papis, who works as a race steward in INDYCAR. \u201cMax wouldn\u2019t let me drive it,\u201d as they traversed the COTA track in a rental car. \u201cHe was too busy being Max and showing me around. I didn\u2019t drive anything there, but rode shotgun and felt like I was going to get sick!\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Johnson missed all the action on Wednesday as he had work to do in Daytona Beach, where Sunday\u2019s Daytona 500 is being held. He missed seeing Will Power set the fastest lap of the day, at 1:46.760 in the Verizon Chevrolet for Team Penske. 2016 Indianapolis 500 winner Alexander Rossi was second in his NAPA Honda prepped by Andretti Autosport. Australian SuperCar two-time champion for INDYCAR owner Roger Penske, Scott McLaughlin, finished third in his second INDYCAR test, followed by reigning Team Penske champ Josef Newgarden and defending COTA INDYCAR winner Colton Hereto, driving for Andretti Harding Steinbrenner Autosport. There were a total of 27 drivers taking laps at the test.<\/p>\n

\"Jimmie<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seven-time NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson didn\u2019t have much to do on Monday, so he took a trip to Circuit of the Americas to check out the first NTT IndyCar Series open test of the year.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":69460,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3424,3470,5029],"tags":[5614,451,395,712,3186,127,41,3708,1632,542,6332],"class_list":["post-69459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nascar","category-news","category-racing","tag-anne-proffit","tag-endurance-racing","tag-imsa","tag-indycar","tag-jimmie-johnson","tag-nascar","tag-news","tag-off-road-racing","tag-racing","tag-road-racing","tag-sports-car-racing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/Jimmie-Johnson-media-day-credit-Getty-Images-min.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42YSK-i4j","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69459"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69463,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69459\/revisions\/69463"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}