IGX

Junior Johnson, a stock-car racing giant whose career spanned the sport’s history from its moonshining roots to its modern era as a fierce, hard-nosed driver and an innovative mechanic and team owner, has died. He was 88.

Johnson’s passing was confirmed by the NASCAR Hall of Fame. He had been in declining health and entered hospice care earlier this week.

Johnson was inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in its inaugural Class of 2010. He won 50 races in NASCAR’s top division — the most of any driver without a championship — and added 132 victories and six championships as a successful team owner for many legends of the sport. Johnson won the second running of the Daytona 500 in 1960, then added two more triumphs in the Great American Race as a car owner in 1969 and ’77.

His all-out style — honed from years of hauling illegal liquor at breakneck speeds through the North Carolina foothills — took a toll on his competitors and his own equipment, earning him a reputation as the hardest of the hard chargers. Johnson was also known as the Wilkes County Wildman and heralded as “The Last American Hero,” after a brilliant 1965 essay in Esquire by author Tom Wolfe.

He is a coon hunter, a rich man, an ex-whiskey runner, a good old boy who hard-charges stock cars at 175 m.p.h. Mother dog! He is the lead-footed chicken farmer from Ronda, the true vision of the New South