Senior Salute

BY BEN WHITE

Leonard Wood, younger brother of 2012 NASCAR Hall of Fame driver and team owner Glen Wood, has been turning wrenches on race-winning engines in NASCAR competition since he was a child.

The famed Virginia-based Wood Brothers Racing organization began fielding modifieds for Glen Wood at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston Salem, North Carolina. Since the early 1960s, Leonard Wood has worked as crew chief for a very long list of iconic drivers.

In this interview with NASCAR Pole Position, 87-year-old Leonard Wood, a NASCAR Hall of Fame inductee in 2013, discusses growing up working on cars, seeing his first race car, his love for mechanical things and working with NASCAR’s greatest legends.

There was a guy named Preacher Pearlman. We happened to be out on the highway, and I was riding in a car and this race car came driving by. They used to have a track in Mt. Airy, North Carolina, and he was on the road driving it to the race. It was a 1937 Ford.

Oh, yeah. I’ve always been interested in them, for sure. I remember my dad had me help put a transmission in a 1939 Ford when I was 7 years old. I was so small I could climb down in there and put my feet against the engine and turn a long-handled wrench and my dad wouldn’t have to retighten the steel head bolts on the cylinder heads. I also remember whittling cars out of wood with a pocketknife, also when I was 7 years old.

(Laughter) Oh, no. I thought it was too dangerous, especially when they’d come by me at 190 miles an hour on pit road at Daytona (before pit road speeds). About all the driving I did was warming up the car at Martinsville, and I just loved to feel the purr of the thing. I remember I was working on the carburetor on the 1971 Mercury when David Pearson was driving for us in 1973. I took the car out on the track and the good news was there was so much power it broke the back end loose. The bad news was I spun the car in a 180 and I thought I was going to crash. I was able to save it.

No. Glen and I started out in 1950. I was 15 years old, and he was 25. I had already been tuning cars and working on engines. I was always the mechanic of the family and all my brothers supported that. I’ve always been interested in engines and made a go-kart when I was 13. I wanted something that pulled me along with an engine. I was always interested in that sort of thing.

I always loved engines and wanted to make them more powerful. I always wanted to see what I could do to modify them and get the most horsepower I could out of them.

Oh, Yeah. There was David Pearson, A.J. Foyt. Marvin Panch, Tiny Lund, Speedy Thompson, Dan Gurney, Parnelli Jones, Curtis Turner, Cale Yarborough, Buddy Baker, Dale Jarrett, Kyle Petty. They all had different styles and you had to do something just a little bit different for them. I enjoyed them all.

I remember we went to Riverside with Curtis in 1965. He hadn’t gotten in the car at that point, and I asked him to check the seat out to see if it felt right. He stuck his foot through the window opening and said, “She’s just right.” And then working with David and how good he was as a driver. He would never tell us anything about the car during the race and then he’d go out and win with it.

I’ve said it many times. Back when I was growing up when Glen and I were hauling corn, I never dreamed that I would have the opportunity to set cars up for the world’s greatest drivers. It’s so humbling to think of how many great drivers that Glen and I worked with in the early days.

It’s just one of the things the Wood Brothers team has accomplished over the years. There have been a lot of other great races, such as Charlotte, Atlanta, Riverside and Michigan that we’ve won. All of them have been special. We need one more to get 100 wins. But when we get that one, we’ll be looking to win more yet. The more you win, the more you want to win.

Well, you know, you always want to be remembered for doing the right thing and not being bad to people. You always want to be remembered by people because they enjoyed your work. It pleases me when I see an up-and-coming driver really start doing well. When I see that, I think he deserves a pat on the back and want to tell him so. I enjoy that sort of thing. When I see a driver do a great job, I like to congratulate him.