After finishing high school, the teenaged Sills moved back to California to start his journey as an open-wheel racer. Johnson’s best finish was a sixth at Darlington, S.C., in May 1969.
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Marilyn later married hometown super modified and stock car racer Richard “Dick” Johnson, who would eventually move the family to North Carolina to further pursue a career as an independent NASCAR Grand National driver in the late 1960s. Sills’ father, a Bay Cities Racing Association (BCRA) midget racer, passed away at 30 from cancer when young Sills was just 3. “These are my toys,” he says with a grin. The retired racer also keeps an array of motocross bikes and karts and works on modifying his fleet from his two-car garage. Sills keeps an open invitation to his closest friends and fellow racers to come by and kick up the dirt at his homegrown motorsports complex. A water truck stands by, ready for track prep. Across the property, since retiring from driving in 2006, the racer has built a private three-quarter-mile, winding motocross track that features a 56-foot jump, a twisting, flat road course for go karts and, like a miniature West Capital Raceway, a dirt oval is carved into the backyard. Sills still has plenty of elbow room as he owns a sizable portion of the land.
They moved here in about 1949 or ’48 and I grew up here with four sisters. “We were rice farmers,” Sills says of his mother and father, Marilyn and Jimmy Sills, Sr. National Sprint Car Hall of Fame racer remembers thrill and heartbreak from his open-wheel racing career Interview + Portraits: Saroyan Humphreyįeature | Dust flies as three-time USAC Silver Crown champ Jimmy Sills, 65, motors his hard-working ATV across the driveway to his northern Sacramento County house and points toward the horizon.
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