This article commences a special series of content centered around the legacy of NASCAR’s oldest, active team, Wood Brothers Racing.
Since Glen Wood envisioned himself competing at the highest level, and enlisting the help of his family, this blue-collared team has withstood the test of time, blazing plenty of memories and relationships along the way.
Now sitting at 101 wins, there is plenty of history that the team has its eyes set on.
But first, let’s take the time to recognize and appreciate what got them here, and their impeccable effect on motorsports. Follow along over the next several weeks as Frontstretch features interviews with several people who have been impacted by Wood Brothers Racing.
Nestled away in the small, charming town of Stuart, Va., sits a gold mine of racing history and innovation.
Just off Route 58, you will quickly notice a white building with a red overhang, elevated on a hill. That would be none other than the Wood Brothers Racing Museum.
Inside the building, one can quickly be overwhelmed by the decor and displays featured inside, running from enlarged photos of the team’s drivers over the years, trophy after trophy, or a multitude of silent race cars that once roared on the track.
Somewhere inside that shop, you will likely find a tall, slender figure of an elderly gentleman busy at work. His rugged, calloused hands piece together different parts of an engine, whether that be the carburetor, crankshaft, pistons, or cylinders. It is rare that he is not smiling, and even more rare that he isn’t making someone else smile.
That would be none other than Leonard Wood, the 90-year-old genius who helped build NASCAR’s oldest team.
A founding member of Wood Brothers Racing, Wood worked on the team alongside his four brothers, including Glen Wood, who ignited the desire for the brothers to go racing. While Glen raced, Leonard served as an engineer for the new team, a role he built a legacy in over the next several decades.
“Back years ago, there was a big rivalry between Ford, GMC/Chevrolet and Dodge trucks as to which truck could pull the biggest load of lumber up a steep mountain, or pull a certain in a certain gear and all of that, just as it is in racing,” Wood told Frontstretch about the team’s inspiration for its birth.
“So when racing started, we were ready to go,” Wood said. “Glen started going to the races and watching Curtis Turner, one of the greatest drivers there has ever been as far as controlling the car. So, Glen and six of them decided to go build a race car, and between the six, somebody was going to drive it. All of them backed out except Glen.
“So Glen took his personal car, and his friend was already racing at local tracks, and in a test session, Glen got to go down and run his friend on the race track with his racecar, and he kept up with him in a personal car. So, he figured if he’d be in a real racecar, he’d probably do alright.”
Glen and his newly established team went down to Morris Speedway, near the famed Martinsville Speedway. It didn’t take long for the brothers to figure out just how crazy going racing may have been.
“In the first heat race, this guy spun out and had this big ‘ole bumper sticking out,” Leonard Wood recalled. “Well, it hooked Glen’s left-rear wheel. It bent the housing, and this was just in the heat race. This housing being bent, towing [the car] home, it broke the axle, and the wheel comes off, jerks the gas valve off, and the housing is hitting the pavement. Sparks flying, gas coming out of the tank, sets it on fire right in the middle of the road between there and Martinsville. So we took it, fixed it back up, and in his first race he ever ran, he finished third, and it wasn’t long before we were sitting on pole and winning races.”
In the blink of an eye, the team had made its way to NASCAR and it didn’t take long for the garage to take notice. That led to one of the most profound relationships between a team and manufacturer in motorsports history.
“In 1956, Curtis Turner and Joe Weatherly [were] Ford Motor Company star drivers, and they both suggested to [Ford] to bring us on board. So we went to Ford, being factory-backed,” Wood explained.
For several years, Glen drove the car, with others such as Turner, Weatherly, Johnny Beauchamp and even Junior Johnson wheeling a WBR car. In 1960, the team finally reaped the fruits of their labor, as Speedy Thompson rolled the iconic No. 21 into victory lane for the first time at Charlotte Motor Speedway. He backed that up with a second consecutive win at what is now known as Richmond Raceway.
It was that same year in 1960 that Leonard, who was making a name for himself as a mechanic, discovered one of the greatest innovations in racing chronicles: the modern-day pit stop.
Up until that season, pit stops were drawn out, with early iterations taking nearly a minute to just change one tire. Bumper jacks were used to raise the car until Smokey Yunick broke out a floor jack, speeding pit stops up. However, during one particular race, Leonard, who was also the right front tire changer for WBR, took notice of the length of pit stops.
“In 1960, it was the first World 600 race,” he said. “Smokey Yunick’s car, Fireball Roberts was the driver, it took 45 seconds to change two tires and gasoline. John Cowley of Ford Motor Company says, ‘I think there’s time to be gained in the pits.’ So naturally, we would like to impress Ford Motor Company, so we right away started working on it, and right away, we were down to 25 seconds for two tires and gas.”
Impressed Ford they did.
The pit stop revolutionized the ways teams operated on pit road, but it was the Wood Brothers who were one step ahead for several years, attributed to Leonard’s innovations and the team’s synchronized pit stops. As a result, it caught the attention of the Blue Oval, who decided to put the Wood Brothers crew on display at “Greatest Spectacle in Racing”: The 1965 Indianapolis 500.
“John Cowley, again, asked my brother Glen to come up to pit Jim Clark [in the Indianapolis 500]. Glen told him, ‘Sure, we’d love to.’ So we go in, and we don’t know if a foreign crew is going to resent us being there. They rolled out the red carpet immediately when we showed up. So we started preparing the car for a pit stop.
“The inspector was looking at the fuel tank, and we were on Venturas back then. The outlet was up on top of the tank about eight inches. The other ones were right on the bottom. He says, ‘How come you have the outlet so far up on the tank?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s just up there.” He said, “‘I bet you a thousand dollars it can’t pour 20 gallons a minute out of that thing. We didn’t bet with the guy. We made a dry run and put 58 gallons in 15 seconds.”
It sounds too good to be true, right? Based on the inspector’s estimate, to pour 20 gallons a minute seemed impossible, so how could a team nearly triple that in a quarter of the time? The audience that day, including the broadcasters, had their doubts.
“[The broadcast] figured we’d be in the pits about a minute, I guess. We knew it was going to be under 20 seconds on the stop. The first stop was about 17-18 seconds, and the commentator says, ‘Well, you can bet he didn’t get it full, green crew and all of that. He’ll be back in, you can count on that.’ [Clark] never did come in like he thought, so they sent a runner down there to [Colin Chapman, owner of the Ford-owned Lotus 38] to ask what he was running, saying we must be running half-gasoline, half-alcohol. [Chapman] said, ‘Pure alcohol.'”
Wood said that even if there were doubters about its legality, there was nothing wrong with it. And thanks to those speedy stops, Clark triumphed in the race to make the Wood Brothers Indianapolis 500 winners, an achievement that Wood said got them more publicity in a short amount of time than they’d ever received.
That win was recently paid homage to with current WBR driver Josh Berry sporting a throwback scheme similar to the one Clark’s Lotus that day.
The innovation that Leonard displayed both then and even now is a quality he admits he is blessed to have possessed from his earliest memories.
“It started ever since I was born,” Wood said. “I remember telling my dad at 5 years old that I wanted something with a motor on it that would pull me along, and that’s when I made that go-kart. I was 13 years old when I made that. I don’t want this to come along as a bragging thing, but all of my life, thoughts just trigger in my head on how to make things.”
That go-kart, which was powered from the motor of a washing machine, is just a small sample size of the genius creativity Wood has displayed. Throughout the Wood Brothers museum, you can find many products of his workmanship, from RC cars to a replica of Clark’s Indy 500-winning car.
Each success story has roots to be traced back to, a unique story to tell. For the Wood Brothers, that can be represented by the old beech tree the brothers worked under when they first dove into the world of racing. And just like the tree, the strong roots the family has built over the years has not only anchored their stability and success, but also painted a picture of where their work ethic has taken them to from virtually nothing.
“I started tuning cars before I was 15,” Leonard said. “Glen was 25 when we started. My dad was a mechanic, a great mechanic. The only way we could pull an engine out was to throw a chain over a big limb on that beech tree and pull the engine out, raise the back of the car up to change the transmission or take the rear end out. We started from scratch, you might say.”
When you take a time to reflect on how much NASCAR has changed, good or bad, from the first day that Glen, Leonard, and the rest of Wood Brothers put their minds to racing to where the sport is today, it is surreal enough to make one speechless on how this little team has lasted 75 years. Over seven decades of memories have been created, including 101 visits to victory lane. Leonard has soaked in each one.
“There are so many things we have done during the 100 [wins], the first one we ever raced, Marvin Panch at Daytona in 1963 […] Tiny [Lund] gets in it and wins the race. Of course, David Pearson and [Richard] Petty wrecking and spinning (the finish to the 1976 Daytona 500, going to Indianapolis and winning that. There’s so many great memories.”
In a sport that is ever-changing, and absolutely brutal at times, how does a team remain sustainable for 75 years, and likely many more?
The answer? Family and relationships.
“I’m so proud of Eddie, Len, Kim [Glen’s kids], and now Jon, Keven and Jordan running the team and bringing it up to 75 years, that thrills me big time,” Wood gleamed when reminiscing about the team’s history.
Wood has no plans on slowing down on his projects, whether it’s building a custom engine or fixing up a car to be displayed. But what truly sticks out about this Hall of Famer are the same attributes that have guided the team to where it is today.
Humility, work ethic, and gratitude.
Entering his fifth year with Frontstretch, Luken Glover is the author of The Underdog House, shedding light on the motivation and performance of NASCAR's dark horse teams as they strive to fight to the top. Additionally, Glover reports for the site at various events, and he contributes in the video editing department.
A 2023 graduate of the University of the Cumberlands, Glover is a middle school math and PE teacher, as well as a basketball coach. He is passionate about serving in his church, playing/coaching a wide variety of sports, and researching motorsports history.