I thought it was over: Jimmie Johnson’s brake failure at 150 mph | Forward Progress

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0:44A couple crashes I wanted to bring up, and you've covered these plenty of times before, but the first one being the all-tell car crash where the brakes give out. What do you remember from that? cars you crash often and you know some are gonna be bad but that's really the first time when I just thought it was over and kind of went limp in the car and thankfully I did because preparing for the impact and lowering my head as I did and going limp was was the best thing for me this crash took place before soft walls were mandatory and before we had any of the mandatory restraint systems in the car to prevent a basal skull fracture which is the injury that killed five drivers and the fifth being Dale Earnhardt Sr.

1:28What do you remember thinking it's happening? It was s***. And then I knew the racetrack went to the right and I tried to make the turn and I was into the grass and lost control of the car at that point. And I had no brakes. When I first, when I went to slow the car down, the brake pedal went to the floor. I had brake failure. And 150 miles an hour with no brakes. And on my way flying into those foam barriers, I thought the foam was concrete. And that's what led to me going limp in the car. And thankfully, it was a series of soft walls, and I was able to walk away from that crash. The Baja 1000.

2:02Yes. And you lose control of your truck. Baja was a wild experience because I literally woke up crashing. Sounds crazy. What do you mean? I fell asleep. It's probably 3 or 4 in the morning. Been in this rough terrain, bouncing around, easy to stay awake. finally got onto a smooth road and nice long straightaway and I just got too comfortable and nodded off and I woke up just before I went off the road and there was a sharp 90 degree turn and tried to hit the brakes went straight off the road and as I was going off the road there was a huge boulder and I hit this boulder and the vehicle went straight up into the air and I recall seeing the headlights just shooting into the darkness and I had no idea what I was going to land on and I was just coming out of a mountain range how far I was going to fall and thankfully it was just a steep embankment and tumbled off into the darkness out there.

2:58What do you remember thinking about out there because you were out there for a while. It was it was probably a full day before we were we had the truck onto a trailer to take it away. What's wild is this is a 95 so So communications weren't like they are today. And then the team itself has vehicles that leapfrogged the race truck going down the race course. Just in case you're not in radio communication, they can keep up with you. My chase truck, as it's called, got into a fender bender in a small little Mexican town. And my chase crew was arrested and put in jail. So when I crashed, the vehicle that was supposed to find me, those guys are busy emptying their pockets and giving away everything they could to get out of jail.

3:46And I don't know if more was made of this than that actually existed, but it caused you to reflect on kind of what you wanted to do? I knew going into that race that my job was in question the next year. And here I am again with a totaled race truck, almost killed my co-writer. The crash, all the impact was on his side. And I had, you know, give it a day to sit there and think about the aggression I had. And I was going to be out of a job. How well do you remember the embrace with your dad after that when you guys met back up? It was huge. And he told me before the race, you know, he had a dream.

4:26Be careful. I'm like, you're crazy. And as I was sitting there in the darkness, vehicles would come by and I would stop them. Hey, we've crashed. We're fine. my dad's in the next pit and everybody knew my dad please tell him I'm okay and it was 60 miles away they all forgot to tell my dad so as I don't arrive my dad knew this mountain range knew that I've been in a crash no one is reporting anything communication's so minimal and he had to sit there with all of that for a long long time so when I saw him there was there was a big embrace do you remember what he said no I remember tears and I don't see tears very often with him and from you too right oh yeah oh yeah no i was hanging on um and yeah i had tears as well but i'll never forget his face walking up to him and just just seeing the relief you know and and what's wild is i see him and i'm running to him it's like once again dad's right like you know parents are always right you never want to admit it when you're a teenager but he was right we'll be back with another positive story from a past interview next thursday and we'll pull it from our highest performing clips according to our digital community.

5:31Head over to youtube.com slash Graham Bensinger to join us. Thanks again for listening.