I had no choice: Steve Johnson

Ahighly emotional Steven Johnson has opened up about the crisis that has hit thegreat Dick Johnson Racing, vowing to fix the embattled business and his famousfather at the same time.

He speaks at length about stepping out of the car and intomanaging the family business.

Junior Johnson spoke at length in a fascinating feature inthis week’s Auto Action. The below is just a small part of what Johnson toldMark Fogarty in AA.

First off, howdifficult has it been to have to step back out of driving a V8 to take over therunning of the team?

“Mate, it’s been tough. I’ve been a driver since I was 16,really, but full-time since 2000 and even still today my passion is driving andI love it, that’s why I’m trying to drive in the Carrera Cup and that sort ofthing, just to sort of stay in the seat. I really want to race the enduros anddo well there.

It was a tough decision, but it wasn’t in a way too, becauseever since ’05 and the WestPoint side of things we’ve been playing catch-up andI guess this time it got to the stage that if I didn’t make this call weprobably wouldn’t have a business to run. I’m not saying that I am the saviourof the business, but it’s just the experience I have had being aroundmotorsport and of being assistance to Dad and the team, so hopefully we cantake the necessary steps forward to make sure we’re still within the businessand we’re operating for years to come. “

You really didn’thave a choice, did you?

“I didn’t feel as though I had a choice, but Dad, he whollyand solely didn’t want me to not drive. He wanted me in the car no matter whatand I told him no.

I could be in the car today, but that’s not going to be ofbenefit for the team down the track, so I just said to Dad, “You really need methere to support you and the decisions you need to make now”, because he hasn’tbeen at the forefront of the business and now it’s at the stage where he’s 67and he should be kicking back and enjoying life like Garry Rogers.

I guess when you look at Garry, he is loving it and having agood time, whereas Mum and Dad have worked their butts off and got out of thecertain problems they have had in the past to only be kicked again and end upback down the bottom of the list to work their way up again and they have doneit three or four times, and that is the telling factor for me that I have toget in there and help them out as much as I can. Sure, it’s going to affect mydriving career, but so be it if we’ve got a business there to be able tooperate and we’ve got 22 staff that we’ve got to think about, too.

That’s the thing that kills Dad – that if something was tohappen that those 22 people would be out of work – and that’s why he thinksabout other people more than he thinks of himself. So I need to come in andmake some decisions that I think are going to benefit the business and thatkeep the business operating.

But sure, it’s been a really hard decision to pull away fromthe driving. I am not saying I’m never ever going to get back to that – if wecan turn this business around and have a business model that is efficient andworks well and is diligent with the dollars that we have got coming in, thenit’s something that I can definitely look at coming back to in the future.

But in the forefront of my mind at the moment is keeping thebusiness going and starting to hopefully turn the business model around a bit.We’ve got a big facility there that pretty much can do anything if we had theright amount of people there at the moment, which we haven’t got. I wouldn’tsay they can’t do it, I would say we haven’t got enough employees there tobecome and FPR or Triple Eight, where we can manufacture parts. We need toboost the business up and employ some more people. At this stage we can’t dothat, so we need to work out what we want to do. We are a hybrid at the minute;we buy some parts from FPR and we make some of our own.”

For the full feature grab a copy of this week’s Auto Action.