Johnny
Thomson

Johnny Thomson was born in Lowell in the United States on 9 April 1922. He started racing midgets in 1938 at a track in his home town, at first in a V8-powered car he had built himself. After the Second World War he carried on racing, won the New England title of the UCOA in 1948 and took a second UCOA title in 1949. In 1952 he was AAA Eastern division midget champion, and in 1954 he won the Eastern AAA championship in sprint cars, then known as Big Cars.

Between 1953 and 1960 he made eight starts in the World Championship, all of them in the Indianapolis 500, which counted towards the title from 1950 to 1960. His cars were built by Kuzma (1955 to 1957), Kurtis Kraft (1953 and 1958) and Lesovsky (1959 and 1960), among others. In 1959 he started the Indy 500 from pole position and finished third, his only podium. He ended that year twelfth in the World Championship standings. In champ cars he had taken his first win at the Milwaukee Mile in 1955.

Alongside Indianapolis, Thomson continued to race champ cars and sprint cars. In 1958 he won the USAC Eastern division sprint car championship. On 24 September 1960 he crashed in a sprint car race at the Allentown Fair in Pennsylvania and died a few hours later, aged 38. He was inducted into the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame in 1996 and the National Midget Auto Racing Hall of Fame in 1997.

Source: Wikipedia, “Johnny Thomson”. Text licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.