SEASON IN REVIEW
Elverta, California driver Dick Johnson picked up his first LASTCAR Cup Series Championship in 1967, scoring three last-place finishes in twenty-three starts during a forty-nine-race season. For the second-straight season, the LASTCAR Cup Series Championship came down to a tight bottom-five tiebreaker where Johnson edged Henley Gray 8-7. After Johnson’s last start of the season in Columbia, South Carolina on August 17, Johnson led Gray by four Bottom Fives, and Gray only scored three in his ten remaining starts.
Johnson was competing in his first season on the NASCAR Cup Series tour at the age of 39, racing in his own equipment after making three stars for Bill Champion and one for A.C. Rakestraw. All three of his last-place finishes that year came while driving his self-prepared #18 1966 Ford.
Johnson’s first last-place finish took place at Savannah, Georgia on April 28 when his #18 lost the clutch after 82 laps, dropping him to the back of the 16-car field. The next came four races later in the May 20 Tidewater 250 at Hampton, Virginia where his time gear fractured after the opening lap. The third occurred twelve races after that on July 13 when an a-frame broke two laps into the 200-lapper in Fonda, New York. The finishes were a microcosm of Johnson’s difficult rookie campaign - he failed to finish in twenty of his twenty-three starts.
Johnson competed in just two more seasons as an owner-driver, racking up 56 career starts and eventually scoring his only four top-ten finishes in his final season in 1969 with a best career finish of 6th in the Rebel 400 at the Darlington Raceway on May 10, 1969. He passed away on December 14, 1997.
OTHER LASTCAR HEADLINES
Fan favorite Friday Hassler picked up his first last-place finish in the 1967 opener in Augusta, Georgia on November 13, 1966. Hassler qualified 4th in his familiar #39 Red Sharp 1966 Chevrolet, but lost the engine after seven laps.
Coo Coo Marlin scored his first last-place finish in 1967, picking it up on February 26 in the Daytona 500, the event in which his son Sterling would become only the third driver to win back-to-back in 1994 and 1995. Marlin’s #04 1965 Chevrolet suffered transmission problems after he completed the opening lap. Open-wheel ace Mario Andretti would go on to win the 500.
Another Daytona legend, Bobby Allison, scored his first last-place run in 1968. Allison’s #2 J.D. Bracken 1965 Chevrolet suffered an engine problem after 11 laps of the Sandlapper 200, the April 6 race at Columbia, South Carolina.
Dirt track expert Dick Hutcherson picked up the only last-place finish of his NASCAR career on August 17 when his #29 Bondy Long 1967 Ford lost the engine three laps into the 200-lap race at Columbia, South Carolina. It was the final season of Hutcherson’s four-year, fourteen-win career.
On January 20, Canadian road racer Billy Foster qualified 9th for what would have been his second Cup start – the Motor Trend 500 at Riverside. But in post-qualifying practice, his #22 Dodge lost its brakes and crashed head-on into the Turn 9 wall, killing him instantly. The entries of both Foster and Cale Yarborough, who also wrecked but walked away later in the weekend, were withdrawn with Foster classified last.
CHAMPIONSHIP STANDINGS
1st) Henley Gray [7 B5s], Dick Johnson [8 B5s], Larry Miller [4 B5s] (3)
2nd) Earl Brooks, Friday Hassler, George Poulos, Wendell Scott, Don Stives, Jabe Thomas (2)
3rd) Bobby Allison, Buddy Arrington, Buck Baker, Don Biederman, Bill Champion, Frog Fagan, Billy Foster, Whitey Gerken, Elmer Gilliam, Jack Harden, Larry Hess, Armond Holley, Dick Hutcherson, Clyde Lynn, Larry Manning, Coo Coo Marlin, Ed Negre, Joe Edd Neubert, Jim Paschal, Tom Pistone, J.T. Putney, John Sears, Curtis Turner, Roy Tyner, Walter Wallace, Blackie Watt, Eddie Yarboro, Cale Yarborough (1)
