His team is going in to this year's Supercars championship without Scott McLaughlin but Dick Johnson feels he has a perfect replacement in Anton De Pasquale.
Three-time championship winner McLaughlin quit Supercars to pursue a career in IndyCar racing, leaving Dick Johnson Racing to enter a new era in 2021 without the New Zealand star or long-time teammate Fabian Coulthard.
Instead the Ford powerhouse will compete with an all-new driver line-up in 25-year-old De Pasquale and two-time Bathurst 1000 winner Will Davison.
Johnson has shown his confidence in former Erebus Motorsport driver De Pasquale, believing he's at a similar point in his career to McLaughlin when he joined DJR in 2017.
"Before Scotty came to us he would have spasmodic results here and there like Anton has," Johnson told AAP.
"It's only about the people you put around them to sort of give you the confidence that, hey, you know, I can do this.
"They've got all this data they study and Anton's had a look at and he's said 'oh that's how he did that and that's how he did that'.
"It's a situation where I think you'll find that he'll adapt to very, very well, and he's got a very good engineer and a good bunch of people round him."
As well as McLaughlin, DJR are also competing without Roger Penske after the American billionaire announced his exit from Supercars at the end of the 2020 championship.
During the collaboration with Penske, DJR won three championships via McLaughlin, three teams championships and the 2019 Bathurst 1000 to become the dominant force on the grid.
Johnson is backing his team to remain at the pointy end despite Penske and McLaughlin's absence when this year's championship starts at Bathurst from February 26.
"Nothing's changed in our place, we've got the same people," Johnson said.
"Sure, the Penske organisation was absolutely fantastic for our team ... at the very top of everything was presentation, number one, and then the procedures and everything else underneath that is what put the structure in place for our business to be as good as it is.
"The drivers are only one part of that business.
"It takes more than one thing to win a race. It takes a combination of many things and we've still got all those things."
