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Sprint Cup
CUP: Glen Wood Started Legendary Team
Wood Brothers Racing patriarch Glen Wood will enter the NASCAR Hall of Fame Friday…
Second In A Series
The lumber industry’s loss is stock car racing’s gain.
Glen Wood once operated a sawmill. There was plenty of business of that sort available in the hills of Virginia midway through the 20th century. But he and his brothers jumped in with the crowd that was bouncing around short tracks in the area in ragtag race cars, and the sawmill existence soon became much too cramped for Wood.
He moved into racing full-time and carried along an appropriate nickname – the Woodchopper.
“I gave up the sawmill in 1954,” Wood said. “I began to see that I could make a living racing if I paid attention to what I was doing and didn’t get careless and tear the car up. I always drove kind of conservative because I knew who was going to have to fix it.”
Wood’s risky decision to invest his and his family’s future in the then-wobbly sport of stock car racing paid off big, and the success he found along the way will be celebrated Friday in Charlotte, N.C. when Wood, 86, will be inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame as part of the third class, along with Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip, Dale Inman and the late Richie Evans. SPEED will broadcast the induction Jan. 22 at 6 p.m. (ET).
Wood won four races in the early 1960s in what would become the Sprint Cup Series, but his bigger contribution came in his formation of the Wood Brothers Racing team and the strong ribbon of strength it has been since NASCAR’s pioneer days.
Glen started the team in 1950 with his brother, Leonard, and various other Wood brothers were involved along the way. It began with Glen driving and Leonard (who almost certainly will join the hall soon, too) tossing the wrenches. They ran Sportsman races in Virginia in the early years before moving into Cup racing with Glen’s debut at Martinsville Speedway May 17, 1953. The team has been associated with Ford Motor Co. products since that first race day, and it became one of the pillars of the sport’s formative years, along with Petty Enterprises and the teams run by Junior Johnson and Bud Moore.
Glen Wood stepped out of the team’s driver’s seat in the 1960s as NASCAR began moving away from short tracks and to much faster superspeedways. From then to now, the team’s No. 21 racers have been driven by many of auto racing’s best, including David Pearson, A.J. Foyt, Cale Yarborough, Buddy Baker, Neil Bonnett, Paul Goldsmith, Dan Gurney, Dale Jarrett, Junior Johnson, Ned Jarrett, Fireball Roberts and Curtis Turner.
In the 1960s, Leonard Wood and his crew essentially revolutionized pit stops, turning the tasks of changing tires and refueling a race car virtually into an art and frequently gained multiple positions for their driver in just a handful of seconds on pit road. That resulted in one of the team’s oddest – and most celebrated – assignments.
With their pit-road work attracting the attention of important people at Ford, the Woods were invited to pit Jimmy Clark’s car in the 1965 Indianapolis 500. Although the environment was quite foreign to them, they helped Clark win the race.
“They had had problems at Indy in the past two or three years,” Wood remembered years later. “They had run well but had problems in the pits and lost the race because of it. And he thought we could do a better job maybe and get Ford in the winner’s circle.
“We were there for a week before the race. We were responsible to make sure everything in the fueling department and jacking the car and whatever were working right. So we fooled with it for practically a week. That, and practicing pit runs and fuel stops a time or two.”
It was a pattern of hard work and innovation that would carry the Woods through decades of racing and to success at its highest levels. The team – now run by Glen’s children Eddie, Len and Kim – remains active in Sprint Cup racing and will return to the Daytona 500 next month as the defending champion, along with driver Trevor Bayne.
Although Glen is no longer an active member of the team, his visit to Daytona’s victory lane last February to celebrate Bayne’s win is remembered as one of the emotional highlights of recent NASCAR history.
The Woods have won 98 Cup races.
“I don’t think guys on pit road today understand the way things used to be,” said Kyle Petty, another of the Woods’ drivers. “The Wood Brothers were the first to recognize the importance of the pit stop. They realized that the shorter amount of time they spent on pit road, the better off they’d be on the race track. Picking up positions is easier on pit road. It’s a timed event. It’s not about how fast you run on the track sometimes, but rather how fast you can be on and off pit road.
“Look back at some of their early pit stops from the late ’60s and early ’70s – the way they’d spin around and rotate around the car was like watching a ballet. Their pit stops looked almost choreographed. While most teams just went out there and executed stops as fast as they could, the Wood Brothers had a plan. Today’s pit crew coaches still use that same play sheet. Those guys were so far ahead of the rest of the sport and everybody else played catch-up for years.”
The team’s finesse showed best during the years (1972-79) Pearson drove the 21. He won 43 races for the team and often was virtually unbeatable on the tour’s big tracks. In 1973, Pearson started only 18 races and won 11.
Wood said his best race memory is from the 1976 Daytona 500, a race won by Pearson in spectacular fashion as he and Richard Petty crashed on the last lap. Although the front end of Pearson’s car was smashed, he kept the engine running and limped across the finish line to win the race. Pearson had asked Eddie Wood, on the team radio, if Petty had crossed the line.
“Eddie told him he didn’t,” Glen said. “And he said, well, he was coming, and he did with the front end all smashed up, and he went on and got the checkered flag.”
The Pearson-Woods pairing ended during the 1979 season at Darlington, where Pearson left the pits after only two tires had been changed on what was supposed to be a four-tire stop. He crashed. The next week, the team and Pearson went separate ways, and that was a mistake, Wood said.
“They had a little problem and left the wheels loose, and he left the pits before they got them tight, and I guess all of that put together was why,” Wood said. “But it was a bad decision to split then. We shouldn’t have ever done that, but that’s hindsight.”
For much of the team’s existence – particularly during the Pearson years, it has run mostly on big tracks.
“The reason we did that was we were sponsored by Purolator … and they didn’t pay us enough to run all the races, so we run just the big tracks,” Wood said. “The only little one we run was Martinsville. And we won there. But that made us get a little rusty on them.”
The Woods traveled a long road from the experience of their first race – on a quarter-mile dirt track in the Virginia backwoods.
“During the race, I tried to go between two cars and hooked the left rear tire and bent the rear-end housing,” Wood remembered. “We were towing it home, and it was wobbling. It broke the axle, and when it came out it jerked the gas spout out of the fender and fell down on the highway and caught fire. It burned it right up in the middle of the highway.
“We rewired it and ran it the next week.”
And still they run.
WEDNESDAY: Cale Yarborough
Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 29 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
The lumber industry’s loss is stock car racing’s gain.
Glen Wood once operated a sawmill. There was plenty of business of that sort available in the hills of Virginia midway through the 20th century. But he and his brothers jumped in with the crowd that was bouncing around short tracks in the area in ragtag race cars, and the sawmill existence soon became much too cramped for Wood.
He moved into racing full-time and carried along an appropriate nickname – the Woodchopper.
“I gave up the sawmill in 1954,” Wood said. “I began to see that I could make a living racing if I paid attention to what I was doing and didn’t get careless and tear the car up. I always drove kind of conservative because I knew who was going to have to fix it.”
Wood’s risky decision to invest his and his family’s future in the then-wobbly sport of stock car racing paid off big, and the success he found along the way will be celebrated Friday in Charlotte, N.C. when Wood, 86, will be inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame as part of the third class, along with Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip, Dale Inman and the late Richie Evans. SPEED will broadcast the induction Jan. 22 at 6 p.m. (ET).
Wood won four races in the early 1960s in what would become the Sprint Cup Series, but his bigger contribution came in his formation of the Wood Brothers Racing team and the strong ribbon of strength it has been since NASCAR’s pioneer days.
Glen started the team in 1950 with his brother, Leonard, and various other Wood brothers were involved along the way. It began with Glen driving and Leonard (who almost certainly will join the hall soon, too) tossing the wrenches. They ran Sportsman races in Virginia in the early years before moving into Cup racing with Glen’s debut at Martinsville Speedway May 17, 1953. The team has been associated with Ford Motor Co. products since that first race day, and it became one of the pillars of the sport’s formative years, along with Petty Enterprises and the teams run by Junior Johnson and Bud Moore.
Glen Wood stepped out of the team’s driver’s seat in the 1960s as NASCAR began moving away from short tracks and to much faster superspeedways. From then to now, the team’s No. 21 racers have been driven by many of auto racing’s best, including David Pearson, A.J. Foyt, Cale Yarborough, Buddy Baker, Neil Bonnett, Paul Goldsmith, Dan Gurney, Dale Jarrett, Junior Johnson, Ned Jarrett, Fireball Roberts and Curtis Turner.
In the 1960s, Leonard Wood and his crew essentially revolutionized pit stops, turning the tasks of changing tires and refueling a race car virtually into an art and frequently gained multiple positions for their driver in just a handful of seconds on pit road. That resulted in one of the team’s oddest – and most celebrated – assignments.
With their pit-road work attracting the attention of important people at Ford, the Woods were invited to pit Jimmy Clark’s car in the 1965 Indianapolis 500. Although the environment was quite foreign to them, they helped Clark win the race.
“They had had problems at Indy in the past two or three years,” Wood remembered years later. “They had run well but had problems in the pits and lost the race because of it. And he thought we could do a better job maybe and get Ford in the winner’s circle.
“We were there for a week before the race. We were responsible to make sure everything in the fueling department and jacking the car and whatever were working right. So we fooled with it for practically a week. That, and practicing pit runs and fuel stops a time or two.”
It was a pattern of hard work and innovation that would carry the Woods through decades of racing and to success at its highest levels. The team – now run by Glen’s children Eddie, Len and Kim – remains active in Sprint Cup racing and will return to the Daytona 500 next month as the defending champion, along with driver Trevor Bayne.
Although Glen is no longer an active member of the team, his visit to Daytona’s victory lane last February to celebrate Bayne’s win is remembered as one of the emotional highlights of recent NASCAR history.
The Woods have won 98 Cup races.
“I don’t think guys on pit road today understand the way things used to be,” said Kyle Petty, another of the Woods’ drivers. “The Wood Brothers were the first to recognize the importance of the pit stop. They realized that the shorter amount of time they spent on pit road, the better off they’d be on the race track. Picking up positions is easier on pit road. It’s a timed event. It’s not about how fast you run on the track sometimes, but rather how fast you can be on and off pit road.
“Look back at some of their early pit stops from the late ’60s and early ’70s – the way they’d spin around and rotate around the car was like watching a ballet. Their pit stops looked almost choreographed. While most teams just went out there and executed stops as fast as they could, the Wood Brothers had a plan. Today’s pit crew coaches still use that same play sheet. Those guys were so far ahead of the rest of the sport and everybody else played catch-up for years.”
The team’s finesse showed best during the years (1972-79) Pearson drove the 21. He won 43 races for the team and often was virtually unbeatable on the tour’s big tracks. In 1973, Pearson started only 18 races and won 11.
Wood said his best race memory is from the 1976 Daytona 500, a race won by Pearson in spectacular fashion as he and Richard Petty crashed on the last lap. Although the front end of Pearson’s car was smashed, he kept the engine running and limped across the finish line to win the race. Pearson had asked Eddie Wood, on the team radio, if Petty had crossed the line.
“Eddie told him he didn’t,” Glen said. “And he said, well, he was coming, and he did with the front end all smashed up, and he went on and got the checkered flag.”
The Pearson-Woods pairing ended during the 1979 season at Darlington, where Pearson left the pits after only two tires had been changed on what was supposed to be a four-tire stop. He crashed. The next week, the team and Pearson went separate ways, and that was a mistake, Wood said.
“They had a little problem and left the wheels loose, and he left the pits before they got them tight, and I guess all of that put together was why,” Wood said. “But it was a bad decision to split then. We shouldn’t have ever done that, but that’s hindsight.”
For much of the team’s existence – particularly during the Pearson years, it has run mostly on big tracks.
“The reason we did that was we were sponsored by Purolator … and they didn’t pay us enough to run all the races, so we run just the big tracks,” Wood said. “The only little one we run was Martinsville. And we won there. But that made us get a little rusty on them.”
The Woods traveled a long road from the experience of their first race – on a quarter-mile dirt track in the Virginia backwoods.
“During the race, I tried to go between two cars and hooked the left rear tire and bent the rear-end housing,” Wood remembered. “We were towing it home, and it was wobbling. It broke the axle, and when it came out it jerked the gas spout out of the fender and fell down on the highway and caught fire. It burned it right up in the middle of the highway.
“We rewired it and ran it the next week.”
And still they run.
WEDNESDAY: Cale Yarborough
Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 29 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
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