by Darrell Waltrip

Updated: November 26, 2007, 11:34 PM EST 25 comments

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That's right, back in 1981 Junior Johnson was the first J.J. to celebrate winning the NASCAR Cup championship by going to the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, and he just happened to drag old DW along with him. That year was a special year for me, Junior and our race team. It was the first awards dinner in New York. It was a huge move for NASCAR to gamble to leave Daytona and the comforting confines of The Plaza Hotel and take of for the city lights of New York.

And trust me, it was an adventure.

Can you imagine all these guys from North Wilkesboro that live up in the mountains and they don't even know what a tuxedo is, and they are trying to get all spiffed up to go to New York celebrate the winning of our championship. It was incredible. Unlike the banquet now, and this is such a contrast between how the sport has changed in the 25 years since, when we celebrated our championship we were in the Starlight Roof. The Starlight Roof is where they have the press conference now. The Starlight Roof is a small room in the hotel, it's a beautiful room but it is nothing like the Grand Ballroom. We were in the Starlight Roof and there were a couple of hundred people at the most — it couldn't hold much more than that — mostly family, friends and what little media there was, a small little gathering. Of course, we sat at the head table — me, Junior, Tim Brewer and I think engine builder Harold Elliott was still with us at the time, that was the winning team.

What an honor that was. We picked up a check for $150,000 for winning all those races and the championship that year. It was so exciting. To win the championship was a big accomplishment, but to be in New York and go all over New York City and do media on shows that you had heard about or watched on TV like night shows and news shows was great. Mountain Dew was my sponsor at the time and PepsiCo set up a number of promotions, interviews and big shows in New York ... it was just the biggest thing that had ever happened to me, and at the time, the biggest thing that had happened to the sport.

I was just so overwhelmed by the magnitude of taking our awards dinner to New York and what it would mean to our sport as time went by. But you know, that was a first — going to New York. We had just come off a pretty exciting first as well, the 1979 Daytona 500 live flag-to-flag coverage. The TV package, there was no such things at the time. You got to watch a race every once in a while and highlights or a condensed version of a race on some television station, but not every week and certainly not the whole race in its entirety, so there was no television package. Sponsors were still pretty limited. We were fortunate enough to have Mountain Dew and Pepsi Cola as our sponsors, but at the time there was still a lot of cars without a sponsor.

The cars then were nothing like they are today either. Our car then was the Buick Regal, and we chose the Regal because we went to all the showrooms — the Monte Carlo, Pontiac Grand Prix, everything you can imagine Junior looked at — because that was our first year we went to the downsized version of a NASCAR stock car. We'd gone from the big 115-inch wheelbase cars down to the 110-inch wheelbase cars with less aerodynamics and you're talking about difficult to drive, you want to make a car difficult to drive? Just take all those slanted back glasses and rear wings off them, that's what these cars were like to drive at the time. So you just chose your best piece in your mind, and we didn't go to the wind tunnel and do a bunch of testing, we just used our trained eye and our experience to choose what looked good and what we thought would work to choose our car and that's how we chose the Buick Regal. And all through winter of testing that year heading into the Daytona 500, we all knew we were in trouble because "man you couldn't drive those things, there's no way you could race them."

The guy that was probably the smartest of all of us, Bobby Allison, and his driver Waddell Wilson slipped around unbeknownst to anybody and found a Pontiac Le Mans that was eligible to run and had a little bit more of an aerodynamic body. Waddell was really sharp at tuning up his cars and knowing aero probably better than anybody at the time. He picked that Le Mans and son of a gun, if he didn't come to Daytona and spank us all real good — he beat me for the pole and he should have won the race but Richard Petty outsmarted him in the pits by taking no tires on his way to winning the race. That's how we did it back then, you didn't have cars that were designed just for racing. You didn't have trick front-ends or trick back-ends. You just went to the dealership, picked your best car and then you tried to make a deal with the manufacturer to see who would give you the most cylinder heads, blocks or any of the hardcore parts we needed back in the day, and that's who you went with. We went with Buick and it turned out to be a great relationship as we won back-to-back championships in 1981 and '82. It also points out to this day what made those cars so hard to drive, they had no aerodynamics.

As time went by, we learned about aerodynamics, and some people caught on quicker than others. But engine-wise, we were probably all equal as they are today. The aerodynamics were really a mixed bag, and it was all done by trial and error. Not a lot of time was spent in the wind tunnel. We went to the wind tunnel once a year, we took our Daytona cars up to Detroit, we didn't even know what we were looking for, we just kind of compared what we had to everybody else and that's how you did it. There weren't any million dollar races. As I said, the championship paid $150,000. I set a record in 1981 for most money won in a season, that was $875,000 and I won everything you could win — the championship, 12 races and everything else and set the record. So we never dreamed there would ever be a day where a race would pay $1 million.

There were no $1 million races, there was no TV package, there were no special cars, it was just pretty much "seat of your pants," we didn't have any computers in the car at that time ... It was all just ingenuity, all self taught — that's how we built our cars.

That's what made racing fun, man. It was just hanging on to that bad boy. You'd hang on to that thing and whoever could hang on to it the best the longest, that's the cat that won the race. You were just basically flying by the seat of your pants. That's really what it amounted to.

One of the things that made that period of time so exciting was because it was all so new. Going to New York for the first time, the cars were downsized and we had our hands full figuring out that car. We were trying to grow the sport and we were trying to attract big-name sponsors. The competition on the track was very good at the time. It was just amongst a few of us, but the few of us that were competitive put on a good show week in and week out. Unlike today, there were no multi-car teams, there were five teams and they had a car each and we were five good race cars. The rest of the people in the field were what we called "independents" back in the day. Same principle that applied then applies now, the trickle down theory where Junior would help somebody with an engine or a car, the Wood Brothers would help somebody, the Pettys would help somebody, everybody would have friends or buddies in racing that they would all help. It was sort of like the A, B and C's. The A's were the guys that won all the races, the B's would be the guys right there with them and the C's were the guys just trying to make the show every week.

The other thing was that every racetrack was owned by an individual, nobody owned more than one track. There were great promoters that helped grow the sport by their innovations at their racetracks and promoting their race. We had incredible promoters back in the day like Clay Earl, Richard Howard, Paul Sawyer at Richmond, Barney Wallace at Darlington ... these are all guys that owned the racetracks, they ran them themselves — that's how they made a living.

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There was no multi-car teams and no multi-track owners. We were all individuals and independent contractors and we went to those people's tracks and they'd help us by giving us a little money and we'd show up and race. Nothing like it is today. We never flew to a race, we drove everywhere. A bunch of guys get in a van and take off and go to California, Michigan or wherever. We just got in the van and that's how you got there. When you got there, you'd stay at the Days Inn or the place where they leave the light on. That's just the way it was back in the day.

My point is, things are just so different. They've changed so much, and there's so much out there now that I think because of that expectations are just so high all the time that it makes it hard to create the excitement that we had back in the day.

Back in the day it was exciting to win a race.

Back in the day it was exciting to win the championship.

The first race you ever won, the first championship you ever won ... we were doing so many things that were new and different at the time, we were all working hard to grow the sport and bring it to another level. We were trying to attract big sponsors, trying to attract a television contract, trying to get people to watch and listen to us.

It's kinda funny in my mind today, all those people that used to laugh at us and used to talk about us being a regional sport, making fun of us for having decals on our hats, uniforms and cars. And now — it's sort of like what I like to say "Hear me now, believe me later," — well, they are all starting to believe us now because there is hardly a sport in the world now that doesn't have sponsors, doesn't have stickers and doesn't have decals and the athletes don't promote something of some kind, that was all things we were doing a long before other people started doing it.

We've been a sport of firsts and I hope we can continue to be. I don't ever want us to be followers, I want us to always be leaders. We have the potential to do that. We have a great product with a lot of super athletes, and a lot of exciting competition. We should be able to parlay that into a home run week in and week out.

I'm glad I was the first one to go to New York and stand on stage. In 1985 we moved from the Starlight Roof to the Grand Ballroom, and I was fortunate enough to win that championship in '85.

I've seen a lot, I've done a lot, I've been involved in a lot and I'm sure there's a whole lot more ahead.

'08, it's going to be great.