In 1950, three brothers came together to start a racing team, and that team is still going strong today. Wood Brothers Racing has been known for three things: a strong alignment with Ford, the staying power of the team through sixty-nine years of competition, and a legacy of successful drivers, which include the likes of Curtis Turner, Junior Johnson, Cale Yarborough, and Bill Elliott, among others. And brothers Leonard and Glen Wood were the focal point of the operation. And it is with regret that we announce that Glen Wood, the team founder, has passed on at the age of 93.
Wood’s life was racing. How could it not be? From the moment he left the life as a woodmiller and start racing modifieds, the track was his home. His racing victories all came at Bowman Gray Stadium, a track notorious for wild antics. He gave up driving in 1964 to concentrate on being a team owner, with Leonard working as the right-hand man on the ground. One of their biggest achievements involved the structured choreography of the pit stop, which shaved times nearly in half from what they had usually been. The #21 cars had always been something to fear, whether it was Marvin Panch in a Galaxie, David Pearson in a Mercury Montego, or Trevor Bayne in a Fusion. Wood Brothers has a long storied career, but it all boils down to two brothers in a wooden garage in Stuart, Virginia…one a mechanical genius with an eye for engineering, the other a former driver turned team owner and manager.
Photo: Wood Brothers Racing
Glen Wood had been named one of NASCAR’s 50 Greatest Drivers and had been inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame (2002) and the NASCAR Hall of Fame (2012). Up until 2018, he returned to Daytona every year, as if it was a pilgrimage. It was in a sense…in 1947, he made his first trip to watch the races on the beach. We wouldn’t be shocked in the least if you could hear a wound-out flathead on the wind on the sands now…
