Over the past 61 years, the Wood Brothers of Stuart, Va., have played a part in some of the most memorable moments in motorsports. But Trevor Bayne’s victory in Sunday’s Daytona 500 topped them all. Bayne, making just his second career Sprint Cup start and his first in the Great American Race, scored a stunning victory, ending a 10-year losing streak for NASCAR’s oldest race team and giving Ford Motor Company its 600th Sprint Cup victory.
The win was special in many ways. It was a dramatic victory by a clean-cut fresh-faced youngster, and it was a popular triumph for the Woods, who remain some of the most respected people in the NASCAR garage. But for the Woods themselves, their fifth Daytona 500 triumph was a way for the current members of the team to pay back all the people that have stood behind them all these years.
“For us to be the guys that gave it to them with Trevor at the wheel is just a storybook ending for it,” he said. “I’m just so proud to be a part of their world. They mean the world to us.”
Crew chief Donnie Wingo also found himself talking about long-term relationships during his part of the winner’s interview.
Bayne, who held off a pack of veteran drivers in a green-white-checkered-flag dash to the finish and beat Carl Edwards by .118 seconds, said he felt fortunate to be a part of one of the greatest moments in NASCAR history.
“I almost feel undeserving because there’s guys like Donnie and all these guys out here that are racing against us that have been trying to do this for so long,” he said. “But there’s nobody that deserves it more than any of these guys sitting up here. I’m just glad I got to be the guy sitting behind the wheel for these guys to get this win.”
For 85-year-old Glen Wood, who has been to Victory Lane with some of auto racing’s all-time great drivers, Sunday’s trip was about the sweetest he can remember.
“It’s the greatest thing we’ve ever had happen to us,” he said. “It’s certainly put us in the spotlight more than I can ever remember.”
He said he was especially proud for his sons Eddie and Len and daughter Kim, who now manage the day-to-day affairs of the family race team. He said the second generation racers are responsible for forging a relationship with Roush Fenway Racing that helped them get a Roush car, and it was that trio that decided to hire Donnie Wingo as crew chief and Bayne as the driver.
“It was their call,” he said.
And he had high praise for Bayne, who was a front-runner from the first day of practice for the 500.
“Trevor deserved to win,” Wood said. “He earned it. He didn’t luck into it at all.
“He ran as good or better than any of them did all day long.”
Bayne’s victory continues a streak that has seen the Woods improve their performance over the past year or so, an uphill turn that the team badly needed.
But Eddie Wood said that even as the team struggled through tough times and failed to qualify for races, no one in the family ever considered giving up.
“You begin to think you can never get back, but you keep trying,” he said. “Just the fact that you want one more trophy, one more trophy, you just can’t quit. And we never did quit. We just kept trying.”
And on Sunday, just like in the team’s glory years, the red and white Ford with the gold 21 on the doors was in the hunt all day and in Victory Lane afterward.
The Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Fusion was painted in those throw-back colors to honor David Pearson’s upcoming induction into the NASCAR Hall of Fame, but Wood said the colors seemed to do much more than honor a famous former driver.
“Bringing back the red and white car with the gold numbers that Pearson drove, that just seemed like it put things back to normal,” he said.
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