SEASON IN REVIEW
Ronda, North Carolina driver Junior Johnson scored his first LASTCAR Cup Championship in 1960, scoring three last-place finishes in thirty-four starts during a forty-four-race season. Johnson narrowly won the Bottom Five tiebreaker against owner-driver G.C. Spencer, 9-7.
Junior Johnson was already one of NASCAR’s top drivers by 1960, having scored sixteen victories through the 1959 season with two finishes in the Top 10 in points. He would go on to win another three races in 1960, including one of his greatest triumphs, the second annual Daytona 500. The other two wins came at South Boston, Virginia on August 20 and at Hickory, North Carolina on September 9.
However, his strong 1960 season began with his sixth career last-place finish and the first of his LASTCAR title campaign. In the season-opening event at the Southern States Fairgrounds on November 8, 1959, Johnson’s #11 Paul Spaulding-prepared 1959 Dodge overheated after just eleven laps. It was to be the first of just two starts Johnson drove for Spaulding in 1960 before he moved to John Masoni’s team just in time for his Daytona 500 triumph.
Johnson’s second finish came in Masoni’s car ten races later in Hickory, North Carolina on April 15, when his #27 Daytona Kennel-sponsored 1959 Chevrolet broke an axle after 11 laps. His third finish came with yet another team, his lone start in a car owned by 1959 LASTCAR Cup Champion Bob Welborn. Johnson borrowed the year-old 1959 Chevrolet from Welborn to make the 15-car field, but lost the engine after two laps. Welborn finished 9th in his #49 1960 Chevrolet.
Despite the hot-and-cold season, Johnson still finished a strong 7th in the final point standings in 1960 and would go on to rack up fifty victories as a driver, including thirteen in 1965. After 313 career starts, Johnson left his driver’s seat to become a team owner following the 1966 season. His team would score three consecutive NASCAR Cup Series titles with Cale Yarborough in the 1970s, then another three with Darrell Waltrip the following decade.
In LASTCAR, Johnson scored sixteen last-place finishes during his driving career, tying him for the seventh-most all-time with other drivers, including Waltrip. He died on December 20, 2019.
The 1960 season put Johnson into a tie with Jimmie Lewallen for the most last-place finishes in NASCAR Cup Series history with eight apiece. Johnson would hold the record up until 1970, when 1960 LASTCAR runner-up G.C. Spencer tied him for two seasons before Spencer took the overall lead in 1972. Spencer’s own bid at the LASTCAR title came late in the 1960 season when he became the first NASCAR driver to finish last in three consecutive races that August. His #48 Weldon Wagner 1958 Chevrolet trailed the field at Columbia, South Carolina, South Boston, Virginia, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Spencer would never win a race, nor a LASTCAR Cup Championship, but he competed in 415 races in a career that spanned two decades, scoring nineteen last-place finishes.
OTHER LASTCAR HEADLINES
The year 1960 saw the first of only two last-place finishes in NASCAR for the British MG nameplate. On June 26, Smokey Cook suffered a steering problem in his 1952 MG after the opening lap of the International 200 at the Bowman-Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The event was the first of a handful of NASCAR Cup races that invited foreign nameplates and smaller cars such as MGs, Corvettes, Triumphs, Austin Healeys, and Sprites to compete with NASCAR’s full-sized stockers. MG’s only other last-place finish in NASCAR came during the August 18, 1962 running of the Bowman-Gray event, where Jim Street’s #4 MG fell out for unlisted reasons after 8 laps.
Fred Lorenzen also captured his first last-place finish in 1960 when his self-prepared #28 1960 Ford suffered a vibration after four laps of the National 400 at the Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina. Lorenzen would go on to win the first of his 26 career Cup wins the next season, which would include four wins at Charlotte and the 1965 Daytona 500.
Four months before Lorenzen’s vibration, in the inaugural World 600 on June 19, Lennie Page picked up his first last-place finish in the first race at the 1.5-mile Charlotte track when his #83 1959 T-Bird was disqualified from the 60-car field. Page and five other drivers were disqualified from the event for cutting through the grass between pit road and the track surface, a penalty NASCAR officials warned the drivers about before the race. Joining Page among the disqualified were several big names including both Richard and Lee Petty, Bob Welborn, Paul Lewis, and Junior Johnson. All six bumped Johnny Wolford from the last finishing spot following his Lap 5 crash in his one and only Cup start in the #88 Matt DeMatthews 1960 Ford.
CHAMPIONSHIP STANDINGS
1st) Junior Johnson [9 B5s], G.C. Spencer [7 B5s] (3)
2nd) L.D. Austin, Bunkie Blackburn, Tommy Irwin, Bobby Johns, E.J. Trivette, Roy Tyner, Doug Yates (2)
3rd) Buck Baker, Buddy Baker, Neil Castles, Smokey Cook, Curtis Crider, John Dodd, Jr., Johnny Dollar, Larry Frank, Dick Freeman, Bill Gazaway, Eddie Gray, Fred Harb, Bob Hogle, Joe Lee Johnson, Ken Johnson, Paul Lewis, Fred Lorenzen, Ed Markstellar, Lennie Page, Jimmy Pardue, Bob Ross, Bob Welborn, Jim Whitman, Emanuel Zervakis (1)
