Wood Brothers Racing was broken seemingly beyond repair in 2008.
NASCAR’s oldest and longest continually operating family team had been passed over by the emergence of the multi-car mega teams like Hendrick Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing and Roush Racing. The Woods were bringing figurative knives to figurative gun fights each week.
Having lured the legendary Bill Elliott out of retirement the year before, the 52-year-old was beyond his prime and their engineering department was beyond the pale of comparison as they failed to qualify for all three triple crown races that season.
Daytona 500
Coca-Cola 600
Brickyard 400
Edsel Ford II, then the COO of the Ford Motor Company, called team owner Eddie Wood at Pocono that summer, simply to ask for a mutual friend’s phone number, but also to check in on an organization that was once considered the Blue Oval flagship.
‘‘How come I haven’t heard anything from you? Where have you been?’
‘Mr. Ford, we’ve run so bad (that) I’m actually ashamed to call you.’
‘You’re telling me my 21 is broken?’
‘Yes, sir. It’s pretty well broken.’
‘Well, I’m gonna have someone call you in the morning and we’re gonna fix this.’
That someone was Jim Farley, now the CEO of the company, but then an upstart with the marque after leaving his role as general manager of the Toyota owned Lexus luxury brand.
Farley told the Woods to come to Dearborn, at the global headquarters for Ford Motor Company, and they had a meeting to hash out what the No. 21 required to keep pace in the Cup Series because the manufacturer wanted to fix it.
The Woods told Farley that they needed engineering help and his response was, ‘okay, this starts now.’
It started right then and there.
“It wasn’t one particular thing but from that day forward things started to get better and we talked constantly with Jim,” the elder Wood said. “We talked with Edsel as we were going through this process and then all of a sudden, this is 2008, three years later Trevor Bayne wins the Daytona 500 in our car.
“So, we went from almost being out of business because we couldn’t make races, to winning the biggest race of the year in a matter of three years.”
It’s a similar story to what happened in 1956 when Glen Wood had nearly lost the race team trying to keep up in the Convertible Series era. Ford and Holman-Moody Race Cars came to the rescue and now the team has won 101 races at the highest level.
“He just didn’t have enough to keep going and a man named Peter DePaolo – a former Indy 500 winner in 1945 or something like that, and he was running what was then later on would be like the Holman-Moody part of it, and he called my dad and says, ‘What are you needing to keep going, and he said, ‘Well, I need a couple sets of tires,’ and he had a car ready to go to Richmond,” Eddie said. “A couple sets of tires and something else and he went to Richmond and won that race, and that fixed it
“That turned it around, so all through time and history it’s been Ford Motor Company that has kept us going.”
There is no Wood Brothers Racing without what is now Ford Performance.
With that said, the No. 21 car hasn’t been this relevant and competitive in quite some time. Harrison Burton struggled the past three seasons but did win at Daytona last summer to make the playoffs.
Josh Berry took over that ride in the off-season and has been a top-five driver practically all season and has now won in their fifth start together last weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
This is the first time the Wood Brothers have won in back-to-back seasons since 1986 and 1987. There are still 31 races remaining and pairing Berry with crew chief Miles Stanley in de facto Team Penske cars look like a pairing capable of winning again.
Should that come to fruition, it would be the first time since 1981 that the No. 21 has won twice in a single campaign.
With all of that said, what does growth look like for this unorthodox Cup Series team? Beyond the Ford support, the Wood Brothers Racing team has been housed at Penske since 2015 with the No. 21 being assembled and prepared in Mooresvile after a six-decade stint operating out of Stuart, Virginia.
So how does a team like that continue to grow? What does that even look like?
Jon Wood, a third-generation team owner now serving as president, recalls a conversation with Landon Cassill, who was asking about the Wood Brothers ‘business plan’ in 2013 and it struck a chord because they didn’t one.
“I thought about that for a minute and (said) ‘what business plan’ (because) that’s not how we do things,” Jon said. “We just get it done but it bothered me enough that I remember that I had no answer, and I thought at the time, ‘Well, we’re doing this wrong?’
“If Landon was asking me just one simple question and I can’t answer it, what else are we doing wrong?”
This is still just a family owned and operated team beyond it’s affiliations with Ford and Penske. At the end of the day, they still have autonomy to hire the drivers of their choice and have a lot of say-so over the engineers they receive from Penske but Len Wood conceded they needed some kind of structure.
“We kind of changed everybody’s roles,” Len said. “What we’ve done in the past is whoever is the best at something, you lead it and the rest of us will help. What we did was we made Jon the president of the company. Keven is … executive vice president. Jordan is the chief marketing officer. That kind of put a title to it but with that title came responsibility. That’s preparing them for the next 10, 15, 20, for however many years.”
But really, still, after 75 years of racing at the highest level, the whole family still has just one business model. Survival. Jon conceded that he still wouldn’t have an answer for Cassill and Eddie said it’s just about continuing to make it to the next season right now.
“Our goal, my goal, I’m the oldest, so my goal would be just to keep going,” Eddie said. “As long as there’s a NASCAR, I hope that we’re a part of it. We’ve been with NASCAR since the beginning. We’ve been with Ford Motor Company since the beginning and those two relationships, partners, that’s how we keep going.
“We’ve went through some really, really scary low times that there was just no way it was going to work out, but you keep grinding away at it day after day.
“I think ‘taking it a day at a time,’ and that’s probably an overused quote but it’s so true, especially with us. You get to this point and you get to this point and you just keep going. The biggest thing, to me, is you can’t quit. You can’t think about quitting and you never give up.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.
