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DJ and Junior Johnson
« on: December 06, 2010, 12:57:31 PM »

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Re: DJ and Junior Johnson
« Reply #1 on: December 06, 2010, 03:03:46 PM »
2010 Champions Carry On Legacy Of Pioneers
Portraits Highlight Link Between Past And Present
By Jason Christley, NASCAR
December 6, 2010 - 11:41pm
 
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – DJ Kennington doesn’t even hesitate when he’s asked what it means to him to be a NASCAR champion.

“It means everything to me,” said Kennington, the 2010 champion of the NASCAR Canadian Tire Series presented by Mobil 1. “It’s what I’ve tried to do for as long as I could remember.

“I always watched the Daytona 500, and then the Cup races on Sundays, and I always wanted to be there. And now that I can actually say I’m a NASCAR champion is pretty cool.”

Winning a NASCAR championship puts a driver in exclusive company, one defined by excellence and achievement. It’s a bond that stretches from the top drivers in the sport’s earliest days on the beaches of Daytona to those that excel at their craft today on tracks throughout North America.

For the first time this year, Kennington and his fellow NASCAR touring and weekly series champions will share the stage and spotlight at the NASCAR Hall of Fame. It’s fitting that the building constructed to honor some of NASCAR’s greatest will serve as the site for its most recent champions.

The NASCAR Whelen All-American Series Awards Banquet is Friday, Dec. 10, and the NASCAR Touring Series Awards Gala is Saturday, Dec. 11. Both ceremonies will be streamed live on nascarhometracks.com beginning at 6 p.m. each night with the red-carpet event.

To celebrate those 2010 champions and the pioneers who helped lay the groundwork, NASCAR put together a very special project: A photo gallery celebrating the champions of NASCAR’s touring series and its weekly series national champion (Eric Holmes, Ryan Truex, Kennington, Bobby Santos, Burt Myers and Keith Rocco) by bringing them together with the championship drivers who came before them (Lloyd Dane, David Pearson, Junior Johnson, Bobby Allison, Jerry Cook and Richard Petty).



Junior Johnson (right) with NASCAR Canadian Tire Series champion DJ Kennington at NASCAR Research & Development Center in Concord, N.C. (Photo Credits Kate Gardiner/NASCAR)

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD WALLPAPER (1900x1264)
When Kennington first started racing stock cars on Saturday nights at his local Canadian short tracks, he counted Earl Ross as one of his early mentors.

Ross holds a special place in the history of NASCAR and Canada – his win in 1974 at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway in a car fielded by Junior Johnson marks the only time a Canadian-born driver has won a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race.

“We had a great time with them boys,” Johnson said. “They were very intelligent. It was hard to believe they had learned as much as they did about the sport and NASCAR. Most of the guys that worked on the car were as good as the guys I had working on the cars. We were trying to teach them, and we learned a lot from them because they had studied the sport so much.”

Johnson, who won 50 races as a driver and six championships as a car owner, was inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame earlier this year.

For Kennington, the winning has come easy. It’s the championship that eluded him over his 17-year career stretching back to his days in the former CASCAR series. Most recently, he posted runner-up finishes in the NASCAR Canadian Tire Series in 2007 and ’09, and a third in 2008.

“That’s racing,” Kennington said. “For me, it just gave me that much more drive and determination. I just always moved on to the next season.”

Now he’ll never have to think about ‘what might have been.’

“It’s an honor you’ll never forget,” Johnson said. “You’ll think about it the rest of your life, about how you’ve been able to become the best out there at any given time. If you don’t, you’re going to leave something out of your racing career the rest of your life.

“Winning and being a champion is what it’s all about.”



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