After covering the 1972 NASCAR Cup Series season as a rookie motorsports writer, I thought what lay ahead couldn’t be as hectic a year as I just experienced.
The ’72 campaign was defined by the war between Bobby Allison and Richard Petty for the championship.
It had been a no-holds-barred melee in which Allison, driving for Junior Johnson, and Petty, already vastly successful as the head of Petty Enterprises, collided like gladiators fighting to the death.
On the short tracks, the two beat and banged each other so often that more times than not, their cars were lumps of smoking metal when the races were over. Sometimes Allison emerged victorious; more often it was Petty.
Fans were riveted to all of the action and quickly split into two camps – one that fell in line with Allison (and the return of Chevrolet to NASCAR) and the other with Petty, easily stock car racing’s most popular driver.
The media was run ragged. The duel provided so much controversy and hard news that to report on it all seemed an all-consuming task.
I know it was for me. At first, I was totally befuddled. I must have looked like it, because one day veteran writer Bob Myers of the Charlotte News looked at me and said, “Don’t you have any idea of what’s going on?”
I soon learned. To do my job, I had to get to know a lot of people whom I’d never met – like NASCAR officials, drivers who became involved in related on-track incidents and crewmen for both teams.
Suffice it to say that by season’s end, both Allison and Petty addressed me by my first name.
Once it was all over, and Allison won 10 races while Petty took the championship, I looked forward to a calmer 1973 season.
It didn’t happen. No, there wasn’t another war. It was quite the opposite: a season dominated by a single driver. It was the year of David Pearson.
Pearson had long since been a very successful driver and fan favorite. He had logged three championships – in 1966 with team owner Cotton Owens and in 1968-69 with the vaunted Holman-Moody team, Ford’s main, and well-funded, NASCAR entity.
In ’73, Pearson signed on as the driver for the Wood Brothers team, which, founded by brothers Glen and Leonard, had been around almost as long as NASCAR itself.
The Woods operated a bit differently than other teams of their stature. They did not compete on the full Cup schedule. They had never done it. The reasoning was that the expense to do so wasn’t logical. To race only on the superspeedways with their larger purses (sometimes much larger) was.
Pearson was the latest in a long list of drivers who raced with the Woods, some of whom are counted as among the best in NASCAR history.
Suffice it to say that the Pearson-Woods union is considered one of the most successful, even legendary, in stock car racing. Today, it is a fondly remembered part of NASCAR lore.
In 1973, Pearson and the Woods won 11 of the 18 races they entered. That is a remarkable winning percentage of 61%.
What comes close is Petty’s championship 1967 season, in which he won 27 of 48 races, a rating of 56%. However, during that year he also won 10 races in a row – which will never be matched.
Rapt attention to the Pearson and the Woods was inevitable. What they were doing to win the majority of the races they entered was newsworthy.
And it begged the question, what were they up to? What did they have that no one else did? Were they that talented or were they up to some skullduggery?
Leonard was acknowledged as a master engine builder. It was widely rumored that he found something that had increased horsepower. But if it was illegal, no one – not even NASCAR – could prove it.
Certainly, Leonard wasn’t talking. That wasn’t unusual. He and Glen were never known to be talkative. While they were polite with the media, they certainly weren’t a wealth of information.
Which didn’t make my task any easier. I was working in Roanoke, which is only an hour away from the Wood shops in Stuart, Virginia. Thus, I was the writer for their hometown newspaper.
This meant, of course, that I had to cover their achievements – and there were so many of them it reached the point that I cringed every time I had to speak with them.
How do I ask the same old questions again? Can I come up with something new or, at least, different? When are they going to tell me to get lost?
Pearson, always laid back and unruffled, was never a problem.
The Woods, to be fair, tolerated me and gave answers. I was satisfied that whenever I ran into Glen or Leonard at a track, I got a smile and a wave.
My theory about their domination consisted of three parts: First, Leonard indeed weaved his magic when it came to horsepower. Second, the Woods were acknowledged to be NASCAR’s fastest at pit stops – and had been for quite some time.
That was true partly because of Leonard’s skill as a tire changer and brother Delano’s wizardry as a jackman – enhanced by a lightweight aluminum hydraulic jack.
And then there was Pearson.
He wasn’t a lead foot. He did not abuse equipment. He was a smooth, calculating driver who seemed to know precisely when to make his move to victory. He wasn’t called “The Silver Fox” for nothing.
The Pearson-Woods union continued to be productive after 1973, with their best season in 1976, when they won 10 of 22 races.
By the time they split after only nine races in 1979 – which is another story – Pearson earned an additional 38 victories.
He won his last, and the 105th of his career, driving for Hoss Ellington in the spring race at Darlington Raceway in 1980.
Not unexpectedly, Pearson and the Woods are all members of the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
Pearson passed away in 2018; Glen Wood the next year. Leonard, now 90, has long since left control of the Wood Brothers team to succeeding generations. It remains one of the most respected and steadfast organizations in NASCAR.
And, in one man’s opinion, its greatest legacy is the years together with Pearson.
Steve Waid has been in journalism since 1972, when he began his newspaper career at the Martinsville (Va.) Bulletin. He has spent over 40 years in motorsports journalism, first with the Roanoke Times-World News and later as publisher and vice president for NASCAR Scene and NASCAR Illustrated.
Steve has won numerous state sports writing awards and several more from the National Motorsports Press Association for his motorsports coverage, feature and column writing. For several years, Steve was a regular on “NASCAR This Morning” on FOX Sports Net and he is the co-author, with Tom Higgins, of the biography “Junior Johnson: Brave In Life.”
In January 2014, Steve was inducted into the NMPA Hall of Fame. And in 2019 he was presented the Squier-Hall Award by the NASCAR Hall of Fame for lifetime excellence in motorsports journalism. In addition to writing for Frontstretch, Steve is also the co-host of The Scene Vault Podcast.