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Sprint Cup
CUP: Bayne’s Daytona 500 Victory Kicked Off Magical Season
Trevor Bayne won the Daytona 500 one day after he turned 20...
Trevor Bayne and the Wood Brothers team celebrate after winning the 2011 Daytona 500. (Photo: Getty Images)
Each January, Charlotte Motor Speedway hosts the Sprint Media Tour, four nonstop days and nights when about 200 journalists from around the world go from NASCAR shop to NASCAR shop gathering material leading into Speedweeks at Daytona.
The idea is for the media members to meet with drivers, crew chiefs and team owners so they have stories to write, televise and broadcast on the radio in order to build fan interest for the upcoming season.
This year, the Ford stop was consolidated in the Roush Fenway Racing hangar at Concord (N.C.) Airport.
There, the folks from Roush Fenway Racing and Wood Brothers Racing met the media, the teams optimistic as always about the coming year.
At the event, Len Wood, one of the co-owners of the Wood Brothers, handed me a very small wood box inscribed with a “21” on it and holding a single seed.
Attached to the box was a business card that read: “Inside this wooden box you will see where Wood Brothers Racing began in 1950, under this 150-year-old beech tree that still stands proudly at the family homeplace. A seed from that tree is enclosed. As we have celebrated being in racing for sixty years, there have been many accomplishments along the way, and even more friendships made. We thank you for being a part of our sixty-one years.”
Len and his brother Eddie are what small-town folks like to refer to as “good people.” Honest, hard-working, unpretentious, upstanding. Racing is the family business and they put everything they have into it, just as their fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles did before them.
During the first decade of the century, the Wood Brothers had fallen on comparative hard times, with their only victory coming at Bristol in March 2001, when Elliott Sadler won. In 10 seasons, they would amass just 12 top-five finishes. This from a proud team that at one point or another in its 61-year run employed 20 of the top 50 drivers in NASCAR history.
And yet, there was something special that day that you could almost feel.
Maybe it was because the team unveiled a special throwback paint scheme from the glory days when David Pearson seemingly battled Richard Petty for every race victory worth winning.
Maybe it was because of the optimism generated by the arrival of then 19-year-old Trevor Bayne, who looked for all the world to be the real deal.
Whatever the reason, I walked up to Eddie Wood, said hello and asked him, “You really think this kid can win a race this year, don’t you?”
Wood never even flinched.
“Yes, sir. Absolutely,” said Wood. “His maturity level, as far as his awareness inside a race car is ... you’d think he’d had 20 or 30 years’ experience. Just listening to him, his calmness ... all the things it takes win races, he’s got it.
“Realistically, I think we could have some really good runs this year. You get in the right spot, do the right things — you’ve got to do everything right to win a race. Everyone knows these are really hard to win. But if we can get to the end and have a shot, I think he’ll hold his own.”
Less than one month later, Bayne and the Wood Brothers would utterly shock the entire sports world — not just the NASCAR community — by coming literally from nowhere to win the Daytona 500, NASCAR’s Super Bowl. Bayne scored one of the biggest upsets in sports history, in just his second Sprint Cup start and one day after he turned 20 years old.
Bayne became the fifth driver to win the Daytona 500 for the Wood Brothers, joining Tiny Lund, Cale Yarborough, A.J. Foyt and David Pearson, an elite group if there ever was one.
As he started around on his victory lap, Bayne uttered what might have been the quote of the year: “Are you kidding me?”
It was a victory for the ages, the youngest driver in the Sprint Cup Series and the oldest team. The wide-eyed enthusiasm of youth and the proud moment of triumph for a team that had struggled mightily in recent years.
If 2011 was indeed a series of magic for NASCAR, and I believe it was, that magic began right then and there, on the February afternoon in Daytona, when for one glorious moment, the impossible became oh so very real.
One week later, in the garage at Phoenix International Raceway, Len Wood’s phone rang.
It was Pearson, the NASCAR Hall of Fame member who earned 43 of his 105 career Cup victories in a Wood Brothers car, calling from his home in South Carolina to check on Bayne, to make sure the youngster was still right with the world, which of course he was.
“Put the boy on,” Pearson told Len Wood firmly. “I want to make sure his head is still screwed on straight.”
Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100.
The idea is for the media members to meet with drivers, crew chiefs and team owners so they have stories to write, televise and broadcast on the radio in order to build fan interest for the upcoming season.
This year, the Ford stop was consolidated in the Roush Fenway Racing hangar at Concord (N.C.) Airport.
There, the folks from Roush Fenway Racing and Wood Brothers Racing met the media, the teams optimistic as always about the coming year.
At the event, Len Wood, one of the co-owners of the Wood Brothers, handed me a very small wood box inscribed with a “21” on it and holding a single seed.
Attached to the box was a business card that read: “Inside this wooden box you will see where Wood Brothers Racing began in 1950, under this 150-year-old beech tree that still stands proudly at the family homeplace. A seed from that tree is enclosed. As we have celebrated being in racing for sixty years, there have been many accomplishments along the way, and even more friendships made. We thank you for being a part of our sixty-one years.”
Len and his brother Eddie are what small-town folks like to refer to as “good people.” Honest, hard-working, unpretentious, upstanding. Racing is the family business and they put everything they have into it, just as their fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles did before them.
During the first decade of the century, the Wood Brothers had fallen on comparative hard times, with their only victory coming at Bristol in March 2001, when Elliott Sadler won. In 10 seasons, they would amass just 12 top-five finishes. This from a proud team that at one point or another in its 61-year run employed 20 of the top 50 drivers in NASCAR history.
And yet, there was something special that day that you could almost feel.
Maybe it was because the team unveiled a special throwback paint scheme from the glory days when David Pearson seemingly battled Richard Petty for every race victory worth winning.
Maybe it was because of the optimism generated by the arrival of then 19-year-old Trevor Bayne, who looked for all the world to be the real deal.
Whatever the reason, I walked up to Eddie Wood, said hello and asked him, “You really think this kid can win a race this year, don’t you?”
Wood never even flinched.
“Yes, sir. Absolutely,” said Wood. “His maturity level, as far as his awareness inside a race car is ... you’d think he’d had 20 or 30 years’ experience. Just listening to him, his calmness ... all the things it takes win races, he’s got it.
“Realistically, I think we could have some really good runs this year. You get in the right spot, do the right things — you’ve got to do everything right to win a race. Everyone knows these are really hard to win. But if we can get to the end and have a shot, I think he’ll hold his own.”
Less than one month later, Bayne and the Wood Brothers would utterly shock the entire sports world — not just the NASCAR community — by coming literally from nowhere to win the Daytona 500, NASCAR’s Super Bowl. Bayne scored one of the biggest upsets in sports history, in just his second Sprint Cup start and one day after he turned 20 years old.
Bayne became the fifth driver to win the Daytona 500 for the Wood Brothers, joining Tiny Lund, Cale Yarborough, A.J. Foyt and David Pearson, an elite group if there ever was one.
As he started around on his victory lap, Bayne uttered what might have been the quote of the year: “Are you kidding me?”
It was a victory for the ages, the youngest driver in the Sprint Cup Series and the oldest team. The wide-eyed enthusiasm of youth and the proud moment of triumph for a team that had struggled mightily in recent years.
If 2011 was indeed a series of magic for NASCAR, and I believe it was, that magic began right then and there, on the February afternoon in Daytona, when for one glorious moment, the impossible became oh so very real.
One week later, in the garage at Phoenix International Raceway, Len Wood’s phone rang.
It was Pearson, the NASCAR Hall of Fame member who earned 43 of his 105 career Cup victories in a Wood Brothers car, calling from his home in South Carolina to check on Bayne, to make sure the youngster was still right with the world, which of course he was.
“Put the boy on,” Pearson told Len Wood firmly. “I want to make sure his head is still screwed on straight.”
Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100.
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