NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
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CUP: The Woods Of VA. - DJ Gets 1st Win
The Wood Brothers Racing Team has been one of the backbones of NASCAR since the sport was founded...
Rick Minter  | http://www.RacinToday.com  |  Posted December 18, 2009   Charlotte, NC
Dale Jarrett’s first NASCAR Sprint Cup Series win saw the Wood Brothers calling the shots in the pits. (Photo: Wood Brothers Racing)

The Woods, from Stuart, Va., have been racing continuously in the division now known as Sprint Cup since 1953 and have 96 wins to their credit.

In a RacinToday exclusive series, Eddie Wood, one of the second-generation members of the team, will discuss what he considers the top 10 wins in Wood Brothers history.

The wins aren’t ranked in any particular order, but this week’s entry recalls Dale Jarrett’s victory in the Champion Spark Plug 400 at Michigan International Speedway on Aug. 18, 1991.
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Michigan was the 19th race of the season in 1991 but it was one of the first races that year in which the Woods were on equal footing engine-wise with Robert Yates’ Ford and the rest of the competition.

“For most of that season we had been down on power,” Eddie Wood said. “But we’d just gotten the new Ford cylinder heads, and all of a sudden we had really, really good power.”

That power was evident the week before when Jarrett finished a strong fifth at Watkins Glen.

When it came down to the closing laps at Michigan that day, the race boiled down to a contest between Jarrett, who’d never before won a Cup race, and Davey Allison, who was in Yates’s powerful No. 28 Ford.

While Yates had years of experience in making strategy decisions in situations like that, Eddie and his brother Len were virtual greenhorns.

“We’d been racing a long time, but that was really the first year that Len and I were calling the shots,” Eddie said.

A caution flag late in the race offered the contenders a chance to head to the pits and give it their best shot.

Allison took four new tires. The Woods went with gas only on the final stop, and they decided to take their chances with the used rubber that was on their car from the previous stop. This was in the days when Cup cars still ran bias-ply tires.

“We had a set of tires on the car that we’d run earlier in the race,” Wood said. “They were really, really good, so we just put them back on.”

The Woods also had taken a different approach in the effort to gain downforce, back in the day when teams weren’t as limited in what they could do to the cars. The Woods chose to use a wider rear deck lid and spoiler, whereas other teams, including Yates, simply tried to get the rear of the car as high in the air as reasonably possible.


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Rick Minter

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