Jimmie Johnson grew up in El Cajon, California, about 21 miles from the spot where NASCAR just built a race track on a Navy base. Friday night, the seven-time Cup champion is going home to race a truck for the first time in nearly 18 years.
Johnson last started a NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race in August of 2008, at Bristol. In the years since, he has won 83 Cup races and a record-tying seven championships, gone into the Hall of Fame, and become a co-owner of a Cup team. Now, at the Navy 250, he is back where a lot of these drivers got their start, on the strangest possible stage for a comeback: a 16-turn street course nobody has ever raced, on Naval Base Coronado, the weekend the sport throws a party for the Navy's 250th birthday.
And here is the quietly great thing about that. A track nobody has ever run does not care how long you have been gone. Every driver in the field rolls into San Diego with exactly the same amount of information about the place, folks: NONE. Johnson has been away almost 18 years, but on a course with no notes, no film, and no track record, that kind of gap shrinks. Maybe not all the way. But some. The blank page is what makes his homecoming a real race instead of a parade lap.
He is not the only face from the good old days showing up. Jamie McMurray is making his first Truck Series start since October of 2008, almost the identical gap. McMurray won the Daytona 500 and the Brickyard 400 in the same 2010 season, and the Rolex 24 at Daytona on top of it. Brendan Gaughan is coming back too. So is team owner Justin Marks. For one Friday night, the Truck garage is going to look like a class reunion.
But that same blank page is a problem for the guys who actually have a championship to win, and they would like everybody to remember they are here.
Layne Riggs, the No. 34 Front Row Motorsports Ford, leads the standings, and lately he has been the best truck on the property: two wins and a 2.3 average finish over his last four races. He carries a 26-point lead over Kaden Honeycutt, the No. 11 TRICON Garage Toyota, who has run right with him all season and who already knows how to win on a road course. He got his first career Truck victory on one just last month at Watkins Glen, where Honeycutt held off Shane van Gisbergen and Connor Zilisch to do it. San Diego is exactly the kind of track that plays to what he does best. Neither one of them has a single lap of San Diego data to lean on, and neither does anybody else.
The closest thing to an exception is the one man who turns road courses into a formality. Corey Heim has won more Truck Series road-course races than anybody in the history of the series, and he leads the whole field in laps led this year, yet he sits outside the championship fight entirely. On a road course, that hardly matters. The smart money still starts with Heim and works outward.
A couple more things before the green flag.
The milestone. Chandler Smith makes his 100th career Truck Series start at San Diego. Only three drivers in the history of the series have ever won their 100th. It would be a heck of a place to become the fourth.
The setting. They are calling the layout the Qualcomm Circuit, 16 turns through the base, including a tight run they have already named the Coronado Chicane. The trucks go 50 laps Friday night, the first of three NASCAR races across the weekend, the 12th road course the Truck Series has ever run and only the second on temporary city streets.
A homecoming, a class reunion, and a title fight, all on the same Friday night, all starting from the same blank page, on a street the United States Navy is about to lend to stock car racing.
Welcome home, Jimmie. Mind the chicane.