Alan Johnson may have a way to go to pass Austin Coil as the most prolific fuel tuner in drag racing history, but is there any doubt that he'll end up on top in the end? Johnson, who won three Top Fuel championships (1997, 1998, and 2000) with driver Gary Scelzi and the Winston team a decade ago, another five with Tony Schumacher's Army dragsters in the 2000s (2004-08), and his first of who knows how many with Larry Dixon and the Al-Anabi team last year, is still in his early 50s.

And just how many Top Fuel championships would Johnson's late brother Blaine have by now if his life hadn't been cut short by a crash during qualifying for the 1996 U.S. Nationals? No one questions whether Blaine, then in just his third year in Top Fuel, would have won that 1996 title. Even Kenny Bernstein, who won a tainted title that year said so, graciously handing the championship trophy to the Johnson family during the awards ceremony in perhaps the classiest move of his long career. "I know this will have an asterisk next to it," Bernstein said at the time. "It will always be there."

"I think Blaine definitely would have a lot of Top Fuel championships by now," Johnson has said of his younger brother, who set the Indianapolis Raceway Park track record (4.61) on that fateful run. "I've had a lot of great drivers over the years, and I mean great drivers, but to me, Blaine is the best of them all."

Alan Johnson may have a way to go to pass Austin Coil as the most prolific fuel tuner in drag racing history, but is there any doubt that he'll end up on top in the end? Johnson, who won three Top Fuel championships (1997, 1998, and 2000) with driver Gary Scelzi and the Winston team a decade ago, another five with Tony Schumacher's Army dragsters in the 2000s (2004-08), and his first of who knows how many with Larry Dixon and the Al-Anabi Racing team last year, is still in his early 50s.

And just how many Top Fuel championships would Johnson's late brother Blaine have by now if his life hadn't been cut short by a crash during qualifying for the 1996 U.S. Nationals? No one questions whether Blaine, then in just his third year in Top Fuel, would have won that 1996 title. Even Kenny Bernstein, who won a tainted title that year said so, graciously handing the championship trophy to the Johnson family during the awards ceremony in perhaps the classiest move of his long career. "I know this will have an asterisk next to it," Bernstein said at the time. "It will always be there."

"I think Blaine definitely would have a lot of Top Fuel championships by now," Johnson has said of his younger brother, who set the Indianapolis Raceway Park track record (4.61) on that fateful run. "I've had a lot of great drivers over the years, and I mean great drivers, but to me, Blaine is the best of them all."

At the time of his accident, Blaine had won three times (Pomona, Gainesville, and Sonoma) in four final-round appearances in 1996 and had a commanding five-round lead over Bernstein's Budweiser team in the Winston points standings. "If he was still around, Gary never would have had that ride, Alan wouldn't have tuned Tony's car, and I wouldn't have this job – period," Dixon said last summer. "Just look at Alan's results, and it lets you know how great he has been and still is."

AJ has won the NHRA championship in more than half of all the years he has raced, if you take into account Blaine's Top Alcohol Dragster titles in the early 1990s. After a second-place finish to Tom Conway in the 1989 standings, Blaine won Top Alcohol Dragster championships in 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1993, racking up 22 national event victories in 35 final-round appearances. In those same four years, he won another 22 divisional events, going 22-4 in final-round competition and winning division championships all four years – Division 7 in 1990 and 1991, and Division 2 in 1992 and 1993.

After initially struggling in Top Fuel early in the 1994 season, the Johnson brothers took their first nitro trophy home to Santa Maria, Calif., by the end of 1995 and were ruling drag racing's marquee category by the time of Blaine's top-end crash on Saturday August 31, 1996.

"Alan's not a follower, never has been," says Dixon, who has spent a lot more years (14) competing against his boss than he has as a member of Johnson's team (two). "We saw it when he and Blaine first started nitro racing, Alan always had his own ideas. Blaine and Alan didn't have much of a success rate in the early part of that first season, but instead of hiring someone to figure it out for him, Alan went home and sorted things out himself. When they came back out toward the end of '94, they qualified No. 1 for the first time and got to a lot of semi's. In '95, they started going to a bunch of finals, and by the end of that year, and they won their first race [coincidentally over Dixon, who then was wrapping up his Rookie of the Year campaign for Don Prudhomme's Miller Genuine Draft team]. They were dominating in 1996 and definitely would have won the championship if not for Blaine's accident at Indy."

So just what is it that makes Johnson so good? A lot of things, obviously, but to Del Worsham, who probably knows him as well as anyone, it's his focus. "He's smart – everybody knows that," says Worsham, who won three Funny Car races for the Al-Anabi team in 2009 and joins Dixon on the two-car Al-Anabi Top Fuel team this year. "He's so focused, it's unbelievable. I've never seen anybody like him. He doesn't get sidetracked by little projects. Me, I'll start 10 things at once and have them all going at the same time. Alan starts one thing, finishes it, goes to the next thing, finishes that, then goes on to the next thing. Nothing is going to take him away from what he has his mind set on."

"If you look back on his career, especially in the early days in alcohol racing, he always came up with his own stuff," Dixon says. "He didn't go to some company and have them build some trick part for him. He always built or fabricated everything himself and ran it on his own car, and, after he perfected it, he sold it to the competition. That's snowballed into what he's done in business. He supplies probably 75 percent of the teams that we race against with all the hard parts you need to run a nitro car. You can just go through the list. Blocks, heads, rods, blower cases, manifolds, fuels system, clutch systems – there's a lot of stuff out there that has AJPE [Alan Johnson Performance Engineering] on it."

It extends to the track itself, where Johnson has always excelled at making critical last-second adjustments. "When he's looking at the track, kicking the rubber on the starting line right before we run, you can almost see his mind spinning, and his senses tell him what to do," Worsham says. "Those tiny adjustments are critical, they're everything. I think the whole thing is like a chess match to him – the tires, the engine, the track, just getting everything in place. I've never heard of him or seen him wonder what someone else is doing. He's the one who sets the trends."

 

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