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.

Q: Your team hired so many great drivers. Is there only one you consider to be the best?

Wood: I've been asked that question many times but I guess you'd have to say that David Pearson's record speaks for itself. There were a lot of good ones in there. Marvin Panch was about the first one who started driving full time for us. Curtis Turner drove several races for us, and won the first one at Rockingham after a two- or three-year layoff. Of course, there's A.J. Foyt and Cale Yarborough. Then Pearson and Neil Bonnett, Kyle Petty and Dale Jarrett. One of the ones who had the best percentage of wins for us was Dan Gurney.

Q: What would you say is your greatest moment in racing?

Wood Brothers

Team Statistics

Years	56
Starts	1,342
Wins	97
Top-5	336
Top-10	518
Poles	118
Laps Led	24,618
Avg. Start	15.2
Avg. Finish	16.8

Through July 28, 2009

Pride of NASCAR

Kyle Petty talks to the longtime legendary owners Glen and Leonard Wood.

• Video: Pride of NASCAR

Wood: I don't know. That would be hard to choose. One of the greatest ones would have been when Marvin Panch was driving for us in 1963 at Daytona and he was also driving a Maserati sports car. And he flipped and turned over and was burned real bad. So there was our car with no driver. And Tiny Lund was one of the ones who helped get Marvin out of the sports car. He literally dragged him out. So we decided to put him in the car and see what he could do, and he went on to win that race. That was one of the few races ever run at Daytona where we didn't have to change a tire. But back then, they had tread on them, and after the tread wore down a little bit, the tires would actually stick better. They weren't like they are today, where if you run them 10 laps, they get off and if you take them off and put a new set on, you're a whole lot faster. It wasn't that way back then.

Another time, we were asked by the Ford Motor Company to assist in the pitting of Jimmy Clark's Indy car in 1965. We managed to make just two pit stops. The first one was 19.7 seconds, the second one was 24.7 or something like that. So it was a total of 44-something seconds, which is probably the least time anybody's ever spent in the pits in a winning race at Indy. And we didn't change a tire that day, either.

Q: What is the biggest change that's taken place since 1950?

Wood: The biggest change is the cost. It's just unbelievable how much it costs to run a team now as compared to before. In the '70s, when we were running with David Pearson, we won half the races we ran with him then, but still they didn't pay anything compared to what they do today, and we ran most of that time on less than $100,000 a season, for 18-20 races. Now, $100,000 wouldn't get you to the first race. That's got to be the biggest change.

Q: If you could choose the first five members of the NASCAR Hall of Fame, who would you select?

Wood: I would like to give you my opinion, but that wouldn't be fair. There are so many deserving ones to go in there and there's just a certain few -- you can imagine who I'm thinking -- that should be at the top of that. There's no question about two or three of them. But it would be hard to pick five. I wouldn't want to be the one who did that.

Q: What do you think will be your legacy in this sport?

Wood: The one thing I'm proudest of is that we started this thing close to the same time NASCAR started and I'm the only living one yet that's still standing, so to speak. It's pretty amazing to me that somehow through all of the hard times that goes along with racing -- there were some lean years, there's no question about that -- we've managed to see so many of them come and go. Some raced a little while, some quit, some started when I did and fell out along the way. Somehow, with the help with my brothers, my sons and daughter and most of all, Ford Motor Company, we're still here. And that's about as good as it can get, for me, I guess.