Jimmy Jam sounds like a heck of a time.
Over the weekend, NASCAR Cup Series champion Jimmie Johnson went viral when he was interviewed at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France, which is the annual street car endurance race held at the Circuit de la Sarthe.
Johnson retired in 2020 with 83 wins and a record-tying 7 Cup Series championships, and these days, he serves as co-owner of Legacy Motor Club, which fields Cup Series cars for John Hunter Nemechek and Todd Gilliland. And he still drives occasionally himself, including starts this year in the Daytona 500 and this weekend’s upcoming race at the Coronado Street Course in San Diego.
Johnson joined the radio crew for an interview during the 24 hour race, and fans quickly noticed that Johnson sounded like he’d had more than a few drinks before hopping on the mic.
You could tell he was absolutely hammered, and I’m sure he wasn’t expecting to be interviewed because I can’t think of one time we’ve ever seen him so loose in public… it’s a criticism a lot of fans had of him during his driving days, often calling him too vanilla because of his straight-laced, very buttoned up personality:
have a radio le mans interview from this weekend with an incredibly drunk jimmie johnson: pic.twitter.com/w9YbpDcE0Y
— 🎯 (@streetcircuited) June 14, 2026
The internet got a kick out of the drunken appearance from the 7-time champion, which even drew a response from Dale Earnhardt Jr.:
“I told yall Jimmie was fun.”
Of course, Dale Jr. knows just how much fun Jimmie can be. The two were longtime teammates at Hendrick Motorsports, and Junior once even told a story on his Dale Jr. Download podcast of one particular party that the two had earlier in their career, and he also opened up about the viral moment on his podcast this week.
He explained that Johnson has an alter ego of sorts named Jimmy Jam, who likes to party and raise hell, but when it came to business, he never showed that side of himself:
“So Jimmie Johnson, I’ve known Jimmie since he started racing in the O’Reilly series, he drove the Kingsford number 59 at St. Louis. And he we’ve been friends all three years, and he always got accused of being too vanilla. He raced for Rick Hendrick, and they were buttoned up, and proper and polished.
Jimmie would never really show his personality, or people thought his personality was super vanilla. But I knew it wasn’t, I’ve been around him, he’s a wild man, liked to party. Liked to raise hell, but he just didn’t like to share that with people.
And I don’t know that Lowe’s appreciated him doing that either. I’m not really sure what his reasoning [is] behind kind of keeping his personal life, or his true personality, so suppressed. But we used to we used to joke, and he told me this, he goes,’ Man, when I go party and raise hell, that’s Jimmie Jam,’ you know.
Otherwise, I’m just Jimmie Johnson.’ And so we would joke with him, like, ‘Hey man, we’re gonna go do this thing, are we gonna see Jimmie Jam?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, Jimmie Jam’s gonna come out.'”
Jr. said he could tell in the video that Johnson was “having a great time” on “another planet,” and he got a kick out of it:
“I went golfing with him one time, and we’re on the golf course and were we’re playing through a couple holes, and we get toward the end, and he’s like ‘Hey man, if you wanna mulligan, all we gotta do is shotgun a beer.’ And so three holes later, we’re all in bad shape, cause we kept on shotgunning beers for mulligans.
And he broke his arms way back in the day because he was on top of a golf cart surfing. I mean, this guy is a ton of fun. I could go on and on. Well, he had this viral moment just recently, a couple days ago.
He was at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, he was having a great time, and apparently, you know, got roped into an interview that he did while he was on another planet. My man was raising hell. And so he must’ve been going all day. That Jimmie sounded like the Jimmie that had been going all day… but good for him, man.”
Honestly, I thought it was really funny too, but Jr. knows Johnson won’t find any humor in it, and he probably wished it wouldn’t have happened.
Of course, he runs a company these days and he wants to uphold his reputation, which he’s done very well for decades now, but I agree with Jr. when he says that there’s no way it will hurt the way fans view him.
In fact, Jr. has told Johnson before that there’s no way he would’ve won NASCAR’s Most Popular Driver Award a record-shattering 15 consecutive times from 2003 through 2017 if he would “done that s***” back in 2002, right before his streak got started:
“I’ll be honest, like, he doesn’t mind us talking about that, he doesn’t prefer it. And he wished that it wouldn’t have happened. You won’t catch him sort of like laughing about it, you know I’m saying?
But I’ve told him 1000 times, I told him in the text message, ‘Dude, if you’d have done that s*** in 2002, I would have never want the most popular driver award, you would’ve won it.’
I was like, ‘If you could’ve shown that side of yourself back when you were winning all those damn races, and people would’ve known this dude’s a good time and not stiff, things would’ve been a whole lot different.’ But that’s who he is, that’s the Jimmie I know, he’s a lot of fun.”
It’s honestly so weird to see Johnson so drunk, but he was in Europe having a good time so good for him… and the best part is, if it’s something he wished wouldn’t have happened, he probably won’t remember it anyways.
The full podcast is available below.
