The Wood Brothers’ 75th anniversary season was already primed to be cause for celebration, well before Josh Berry’s stirring triumph last weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway added another page to the lore of NASCAR’s most veteran team. As the family-run organization forges into the future, an opportunity to honor another great moment in the team’s history is taking shape, this time at another legendary venue.
The Wood Brothers unveiled a brilliant retro-themed paint scheme Thursday morning at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, displaying a green-and-yellow No. 21 Mustang that the team will race during Throwback Weekend on April 5-6 at Darlington Raceway. The vintage design makes a nod to the Ford-powered Lotus driven to victory by Jim Clark in the 1965 Indianapolis 500.
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The Wood Brothers played a pivotal role in that Indy win some 60 years ago, bringing their pit-stop choreography and ingenuity to the Brickyard and exposing their methods to a new motorsports audience. Perhaps taking a cue from Indy’s heritage, Darlington played host to NASCAR’s first 500-mile race in 1950, and while IndyCars only raced there for a handful of years in the track’s infancy, the thought of a crisp Lotus paint scheme … er, livery … hurtling through the turns at the track “Too Tough to Tame” is a delicious contrast of racing history books.
“I call them tribute schemes, but we’ve been looking for every opportunity to do those, and Darlington being throwback city, it just made sense to do it there,” says Jon Wood, team president. “You know, it’s easy to maybe debate the appropriateness of an Indy 500 paint scheme at Darlington, but does it really matter? Darlington is about celebrating the history of the sport, and this is entirely appropriate in that aspect, so it seemed like it was a good fit, and that’s where we are.”
Darlington has been the home of eight Cup Series victories for Wood Brothers Racing, including six of those with Hall of Famer and South Carolina legend David Pearson. For throwback weekend, a handful of historic cars — a 1971 Pearson Mercury and a later-model Neil Bonnett Thunderbird — are set to be on display to commemorate the team’s anniversary at one of its stronghold tracks.
The team’s current-day car for Darlington will take a little getting used to, with unfamiliar colors riding along in a departure from its traditional red-and-white look. The genesis of the paint scheme stemmed from an exploration of the team’s history by the collective Wood Brothers and affiliated Team Penske public relations and design departments, with the No. 82 that Clark campaigned back then being replaced by a similarly styled No. 21.
Jon Wood went so far as to reach out to Clive Chapman, son of Team Lotus founder Colin Chapman, for his blessing in making the throwback design come to life — a show of respect to the family that has preserved the British automaker’s racing history. Wood says that once he provided an explanation that the project wasn’t a sales pitch, the two connected.
“I’m trying my damnedest to make him understand what a throwback is, but they use words like livery and revival,” Wood said. “So I’m trying to translate from my hillbilly talk to words he’ll understand, and I think toward the very end, he sort of started to get it.”
He followed up the phone call with one last e-mail to Chapman that spelled out the team’s intentions. Within 12 hours, Wood said Chapman replied on Team Lotus letterhead, granting rights to the team’s trademarks, expressing the desire to create a diecast, and conveying his excitement about the Wood Brothers’ Darlington vision.
Another phone call 60 years earlier provided the story with its origins. John Cowley headed up Ford Motor Company’s NASCAR operations at the time, and he would later go on to spearhead the manufacturer’s Le Mans effort with the GT40. Charged with reversing Ford’s Indy 500 fortunes after stinging losses the previous two years, Cowley called Glen Wood to ask if his team would be willing to bring its NASCAR pit-stop techniques to Indianapolis.
“I remember my dad talking about it, saying, ‘you’re kidding, right?’ ” says Eddie Wood, now the team’s CEO. “And (Cowley) said, ‘No, I’m serious.’ Well, yes, I’m sure he said it would be an honor to do that, so that’s how it started.”
With little need for changing tires during the 500-miler, given the hard rubber of the era, the Wood Brothers’ ingenuity came through most in refueling. Leonard Wood stealthily created a venturi mechanism inside the car’s fuel tank that vastly improved the speed of the flow, almost suctioning the fuel from the cans.
Len Wood, Glen’s youngest son and now the team’s CFO, said that even the team’s top rivals could only manage a full fill-up in roughly one minute, 15 seconds. Others snickered about the team’s tank tinkering, but the proof was in the pit stop.
“Leonard and them, in secret in practice for the race, they put in 58 gallons in 15 seconds,” Len Wood says, “so they knew they had it and it was going good.”
Colin Chapman himself was among the skeptics when race day came and the fuel stops went dizzyingly fast, feeling there was no way the car’s tank was full, but the Lotus-Ford chugged on. Len Wood said the team split the 500-mile race into thirds, taking 41.9 seconds for just two stops. Clark led 190 of the 200 laps in Ford’s first Indy 500 victory.
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Back in the family’s home state of Virginia, Eddie Wood was creating some innovation of his own. Glen’s oldest son didn’t make the trip to Indianapolis because he had school that Monday, when the race used to be held, but he received a steady stream of updates from the live broadcast on a tinny Toshiba transistor radio. A measure of subterfuge was necessary, lest he draw the wrath of his teacher, Ms. Rangeley, and her brand of discipline.
“It was about size of a pack of cigarettes, I guess maybe a little bigger, and you plugged in the little earphone thing that looked like an old-timey hearing aid,” Eddie Wood recalled. “It was in my pocket, and I ran (the cord) up under my shirt and had it on my collar I wore. I made sure I wore a collared shirt that day. A couple of my buddies knew that I was doing it, so they kind of covered for me.”
Eddie Wood says he managed to listen to the full broadcast without his teacher noticing. “If she had caught me, it would have been bad because she had a paddle,” he says with a laugh. “I never got it, but she had one. So that would have been bad, but I didn’t get caught.”
Those stories remain lively parts of the Wood Brothers’ history book, but with Berry’s arrival and Sunday’s winning performance in just their fifth race together, new chapters are being added. Jon Wood says interest from fans is rising, with five recent diecast model cars all reaching their pre-sale minimums. He also credits Berry’s experience, saying he may be considered a relative newcomer to the Cup Series, but that his credentials as a 34-year-old veteran have smoothed his transition to NASCAR’s top tour.
Eddie Wood seconded that opinion, pointing out how the bonds that first-year crew chief Miles Stanley has built with his driver in a short time have helped the team grow. He invokes the names of some legendary driver-crew chief pairings from NASCAR history to drive the point home.
“We started this season at Bowman Gray Stadium, which is very special to us, but you could tell from the first practice that Miles Stanley and Josh were clicking,” Eddie Wood says. “They just clicked, and that doesn’t always happen. You know, you’ve got Leonard Wood, David Pearson, and Richard Petty and (Dale) Inman, and (Jeff) Gordon and (Ray) Evernham. You’ve got things throughout history where special people got together and special things happened, and it just feels like that those two just click.
“It’s like you can go through it like, OK, if I’m the driver, you’re the crew chief, you and I can go to lunch, we can go to dinner, we can go on vacation together, we can hang out every day, but we still might not click, but they do. I don’t know a better word than click, but it’s chemistry, it’s whatever, but they have a mutual respect for each other and they just hit it off, right off the bat. This is Miles’ first season as a crew chief, Josh’s second season in Cup and to be as competitive as those two are right now, it’s just amazing.”
