Glen Wood looks back on legendary NASCAR career

Glen Wood's stock-car racing history mirrors that of NASCAR. He and brother Leonard had a talent for mechanical things, and in 1950, started a family racing operation with a few friends around their hometown of Stuart, Va. They raced local tracks, and by 1953, Glen Wood had moved up into NASCAR's premier division. He won four races as a driver -- all at Bowman-Gray Stadium in nearby Winston-Salem, N.C. By the early '60s, he found most of his time taken up with management, so he left the driving of the famous No. 21 to some of racing's greatest names. And thanks to Leonard's innovations, the Wood Brothers were responsible for inventing the modern pit stop.

Q: You started out as the driver for the Wood Brothers in the early 1950s and won several times. At what point did you decide to step away and run the operation instead?

Glen Wood

Driving Statistics

Year	Starts	Wins	Top-5	Top-10
1953	2	0	0	0
1954	1	0	0	0
1955	1	0	0	0
1956	2	0	0	0
1957	6	0	0	1
1958	10	0	1	7
1959	20	0	9	13
1960	9	3	6	7
1961	6	0	3	3
1963	3	1	2	2
1964	2	0	1	1
Totals	62	4	22	34

Wood: We started out building the cars here in Stuart, some friends of mine and my brothers. We never even thought where things would go, but eventually, it got better and better. We got hooked up with Ford in about 1956. As it progressed on, I was getting a little older, it was getting bigger and there were more things to do, and we hired Marvin Panch in 1962 until he retired in about 1965 or 1966. So it gradually got to where I knew he wanted to run alone so I just decided to step away and let him do that.

Q: Your team was known for innovation, particularly for inventing and refining the modern-day pit stop. How did that come about?

Wood: Well, when you were running on the track around two or three seconds behind, and you both made pit stops under green and you both came back out and now you're ahead of that guy, it didn't take too much thinking to realize we could do something about that. I guess we were maybe the first ones to take it a little more serious about faster stops. I would give credit to Leonard more for that than myself, because he was the crew chief and what that meant back in those days was he did most of the work.

He helped work with Ingersoll-Rand to perfect the air guns that they have today. They kept trying to get one better, and we would try them and suggest things to make them better, and as it turns out, we found one that was the best and they perfected it. And that's still the best air gun you can get today. And in the meantime, jacks were another important thing in a pit stop. A drive-off, store-bought jack to raise the car the height it needed to be would take 10, 15 pumps. And Leonard perfected one that would do it in two or three. The cars are lighter today so using that very same type of jack, they've got them so they can lift them on one or two pumps. Back when we were running, the cars were 4,500 pounds. You had to have a lot more force to raise it than you do now.

All of that came into play at sort of the same time. They had a lot of pit races and pit contests then, especially Union Oil at the time had that. And sometimes at various race tracks. And we won a lot of them. Naturally, as we got more familiar with it, we did better. And we practiced at it, probably more than some of them did, but they practice now, night and day almost. We didn't do that, but as long as you're beating the competition out, that's all you needed. (Continued)