Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Darlington Media Availability
Monday, August 26, 2024
Wood Brothers Racing celebrated its 100th NASCAR Cup Series victory on Saturday night when Harrison Burton won the Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona International Speedway. Team owners Eddie, Len and Jon Wood spoke to members of the media earlier today about that race and the reaction it has received.
EDDIE WOOD, CEO, Wood Brothers Racing – YOU HAD 315 TEXT MESSAGES JUST A FEW HOURS AFTER THE RACE. WHERE ARE YOU AT NOW AS FAR AS THAT GOES? “I think I’ve got about 177 yet to go. I’ve heard from people that I hadn’t heard from since I was in high school and I’m gonna answer every one of them even if it takes me a week. I’m catching up on it. I spent all day yesterday doing it. Most of the time when you send somebody a text after they send you one, or course, they may answer it and then you get into a conversation and it takes a little while, but it’s a really cool thing to be hearing from that many people.”
WHAT HAS IT BEEN LIKE HAVING HARRISON, WHOSE FAMILY HAS RACED, WITH A FAMILY-OWNED TEAM? “I think that’s one thing that makes it easy. He grew up around his dad and his uncle racing. His cousins race. You grow up in a racing family and it’s easier to just do things because you know they understand. If Len or I or Jon or somebody is talking to Harrison about something it’s like, ‘You know what I mean. Your family is the same as ours.’ You grew up with racing being the only topic that was ever talked about at lunch or dinner or in the car – wherever you were it was about racing and I’m sure that’s the way he grew up. I know when Kyle Petty drove for us we spent about the first day, we loaded up to go to Daytona and test in January and we just got to talking about, ‘What do they do at your dinner table? Do you all talk? What do you eat for lunch?’ There were so many things that were the same and it’s no different with Harrison.”
WHAT KIND OF INFLUENCE HAVE YOU SEEN JEFF HAVE ON HARRISON AS A YOUNG MAN TRYING TO FIND HIS WAY IN THIS SPORT? “Jeff, being on the TV side of it, a lot of times he’s not where he can come around the car early. He’s doing his day job, but he always comes by and Jeff always watches the races from up top, whether he’s doing TV or whatever. He’s never around the pit box during the race. He’s always on top of the spotter’s stand or somewhere like that, but I think he gives Harrison enough room. As a dad, my son raced too, you can’t get in too deep with it. You just have to kind of be there when they want something. If you see something that is good or bad or you need to talk about it, usually save that for later. Jeff as well as Kim have been big influences on his life. He’s probably the most polite young man I’ve ever been around in my life.”
JON WOOD, President, Wood Brothers Racing – HOW WILL YOU LOOK AT THE TIME HARRISON HAS BEEN WITH YOUR TEAM NOW VERSUS THREE DAYS AGO? “I’m not gonna go too far on this, but I saw a different Harrison Burton that last three miles or five miles, whatever it was. I don’t know if it was a confidence thing that maybe we’ve been missing because there are times where we’re pretty good and there are times when it’s almost like he hits another gear. That doesn’t mean we have to be running up front. I’ll give you an example. Last week at Michigan, he’s racing around some guy and we’re getting passed and getting passed. The next one in line is Hocevar to make the pass on us and it’s like he would have wrecked before he let Hocevar pass him (laughing). It was crazy, and I don’t know if he knows that or if it’s just like a subconscious thing that he’s not aware of. I guess what I’m trying to get at is that I’m hoping this has given him some kind of a confidence boost because I saw a different Harrison those last two laps. It was a very aggressive, a very willing to risk it all type of race that he ran those last few laps.”
EDDIE WOOD CONTINUED – WHAT DOES THE WIN MEAN WHEN YOU LOOK BACK ON THIS THREE YEARS WITH HARRISON? “You just remember what just happened. We just never could seem to really find the magic to make it all work and you never know when things are gonna start working. It obviously started Saturday night and, like Jon said, when that restart happened I felt like he was gonna win the race. There’s just so much at stake in these races anymore, but he was willing to risk it all and he did that. To outrun or beat Kyle Busch on a green-white-checker is hard to do. It’s almost unimaginable to some point, and I’d like to say that Kyle, I respect him a lot. He raced those last two laps like the two-time champion that he is. I think he raced with respect. I think Harrison raced with respect and the guys pushing both of them did as well. It was kind of an old school finish right there.”
A GUY CALLED THE RADIO THIS MORNING AND BROKE INTO TEARS BECAUSE OF HOW EMOTIONAL IT WAS TO SEE THE 21 WIN AGAIN. WHAT DOES IT SAY ABOUT YOUR LEGACY IN THIS SPORT TO SEE THAT KIND OF A REACTION? “I was crying as well. Just about everybody in Victory Lane was that way. Just thinking back about it and it’s still there. Sometimes I even get to thinking about Trevor’s win in 2011 and get kind of emotional. Racing is something that you just put everything you’ve got into it and everybody does. If you’re a real racer and probably the older you are the more it means, but I’m just proud of all the team that put it all together and all the people that helped us get here. All of the fans. We’re in Stuart (VA) today and there have been a lot of people in and out of the museum and they’re the same way. They know more about the finish than I do, which is really amazing now and a lot of them are my age. They watched it on TV. They didn’t see it on the phone. They watched every minute of it and it’s just really cool.”
JON WOOD CONTINUED – “I tried to touch on this the other night and I was looking at Lee and I got a little bit choked up, but the thing that stood out to me the most was sitting in that same exact seat in that same media center in Daytona and thinking back to where we were in 2016. We didn’t want to be there. We didn’t want to have to face the music and sit in front of everybody and really almost it wasn’t that we were lying, but when dad said that we’re gonna be OK and everything is gonna be alright, we didn’t know that. We were hoping, but we didn’t know that and it was a really, really, really difficult time, and so to have sat there then and went through that at the lowest of lows, and then to be able to go back and be on one of the highest of highs, it was just really a contrast for me. I got tangled up when I was trying to express that, but I think I can do it now and do a little bit better job.”
LEN WOOD, COO, Wood Brothers Racing – “I think it was me that said we’ll be OK, and we were. I said if we perform like we’re supposed to, we’ll be fine, and I think that year we did, and then the following year with Blaney we did excellent. But we’ve overcome all that. To go back to our fans, winning is hard and it should be. We don’t win a lot, but I think when we do, then the built-up emotions come out when we do win. I’ve had people say that they were laying on their floor crying or jumping up and down crying. For me, I didn’t cry, but I was so happy to see the smile on Harrison’s face and his mom and his dad. That was what was the best part for me.”
EDDIE WOOD CONTINUED – “Yeah, I would agree with that. Harrison’s mom, Kim, and his girlfriend usually are on the pit box. Kim is always there. I would imaging that she has been to every race – go-kart, pedal car, whatever it is – she has always been there. Just the happiness with those two and Jeff, that was a big deal. I told Jeff. I said, ‘You know, winning fixes things.’ Things that seem to be such a big deal yesterday or this morning, when you win it just fixes everything. Running well fixes a lot, but winning just makes a wet road dry.”
LEN WOOD CONTINUED – WHAT WAS LEONARD’S REACTION? “He’s telling us everybody that’s called him, from Roger Penske to Ray Evernham to Chip Ganassi. He’s over the moon as well. Like I said, we’re in Virginia now, so he was very happy and actually Uncle Delano and Aunt Crystal – the last three of the original group – were at our shop today and we had a picture taken with a 100 win banner.”
JON WOOD CONTINUED – WHAT WERE YOU THINKING IN THE CLOSING LAPS WITH KYLE BUSCH AND HARRISON GOING AT IT? “I think the way that I look at these speedway races is I count the cars that are running and I look at it from where can we be worst case. That isn’t a direct attack on Harrison, that’s just how these races unfold. So as that race progressed I kept thinking, ‘OK, there are 30 left. The worst we can be is 30th.’ Then there’s 20. Then there’s 15. Then there’s whatever there was on the lead lap, but Harrison is on the front row. On that final restart I’m thinking, ‘As long as he doesn’t get just totally knocked out of the way, we should come out of here with something to not be ashamed of.’ It did not dawn on me until I saw his car on the frontstretch, like right before the start-finish line, that he had a chance to win it. It’s not something that you allow yourself to think about because it’s almost like you’ll jinx it.”
LEN WOOD CONTINUED – “We were watching on TV in the lounge. We went to the lounge because we could hear better the talk from pit road. It was one of those things where you had to almost had to watch the TV, watch him go by and like, ‘Wait a minute. Did we really do it?’ And once we did, then we’re jumping up and down. You didn’t think going down the backstretch, ‘Well, we’re gonna win this race.’ But, there again, we’ve been so close so many times that you’ve got to get to the start-finish line. It’s just like David Pearson and Richard Petty in ‘76. Well, Richard Petty is gonna win. Well, wait a minute, he stalled. No, he didn’t. Eddie was on the radio with Pearson and he asked where Richard was at and he said, ‘Well, he’s stalled,’ and he said, ‘Well, I’m coming.’ And so it wasn’t over until it was over. It was the same thing as this. It’s not over until the cross that start-finish line, so you never know.”
EDDIE WOOD CONTINUED – WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO YOU THAT LEONARD WOOD IS STILL HERE TO HELP CELEBRATE THIS 100TH WIN? “That’s a really big deal to us. I don’t know how many of you have been around Leonard lately, but he works everyday at the museum. Our museum, of course, is our old race shop, so it’s a full machine shop and all that. It’s like a race shop, but he works everyday. A lot of times he works on Saturdays and he’s got projects. He and Benny Belcher, which is another machinist that works there since the mid-eighties, they just work on projects. Right now, he’s building a half-size, half-scale BOSS 429 and it’s made out of aluminum – like pieces of aluminum. There’s nothing made on a CNC machine. It’s all hand done. This morning was the first time I saw him since the race and it was just like he was there. He knew as much about it as if he had been there. He’s just got such an understanding of racing and his mind is just as sharp. In fact, his workmanship now is probably better than it was when he was crew chief in the seventies or eighties. I’m really happy he’s able to enjoy it too. He may get to come to Darlington. He’s talking about coming to Darlington, so that will be cool.”
LEN WOOD CONTINUED – “He turns 90 in about a month and you wouldn’t know it. As Eddie said, he is at the peak of his craftsmanship right now in making things. It doesn’t matter what we ask. What’s broken that we hand to him, he hands it back fixed or exactly like we asked.”
EDDIE WOOD CONTINUED – WHAT DOES HE SAY WHEN YOU TELL HIM YOU’RE GOING TO JOSH BERRY NEXT YEAR? DOES HE HAVE ANY SAY IN THAT? “He was aware of it. He’s aware of everything that goes on, but he’s an old crew chief. Crew chiefs know just about everything about everything, and they know how to understand things and they see through things. They’re able to see things that the rest of us don’t sometimes, so he was aware that we were gonna probably make a change for ‘25 and Josh was one of them that he had recommended. He never even met him. He just watched him race, but he’s watched a lot of great drivers and crew chiefed for a lot of great drivers through the years and guys like him, they just know. But he’s over the moon happy for Harrison and Jeff and Kim. We’ve known that family since Jeff, in fact I think Len may remember this, but we were testing in Loudon, New Hampshire one summer and Jeff was up there with at that time was a Busch car, and then about the next year all of a sudden Jeff Burton starts for Jack and starts winning races, so we go back a long ways.”
WOOD BROTHERS RACING HAS NEVER BEEN A TWO-CAR OPERATION. “They raced two cars a couple times, but we never ran all of the races or the full schedule until Kyle Petty came to race for us in ‘85. So, in the mid-sixties one time they took three cars to Riverside, California and one of them was Dan Gurney, who won the race, and Marvin Panch, I think, finished second and Curtis Turner was in the third car and I think he was in the top six. But it was always us as a family team. We didn’t have enough people to do that, but we always had enough support and things from Ford Motor Company. During the eighties, Citgo petroleum was our sponsor and we had Purolator to assist with the Ford stuff in the seventies, but it just never was something that we really pursued. These guys that have four cars now and Jack used to have five. I don’t know how they keep up with it, but he told me one time you just got one car and you multiply by four or five or whatever it is, you just do it that way. But single car stuff has always worked for us.”
JON WOOD CONTINUED – WHAT ARE YOUR EXPECTATIONS FOR 2025? “I would hope that Josh Berry at least performs as well as he is each week now. There’s not gonna be the distraction that is probably taking place inside that shop right now, and I don’t know what level of influence that’s having on their performance, but it’s got to have some. So, I would hope that he at least performs as well as he is each week next year for us and that’s really about all I can say. That’s what I hope.”
LEN WOOD CONTINUED – DO YOU SEE A POINT WHERE HARRISON COULD POSSIBLY GET TOGETHER AGAIN AT SOME POINT? “I told Harrison several weeks ago, ‘Never say never.’ We had Neil Bonnet twice – two different sessions back in the eighties. It was almost eight or nine years apart, so never say never.”
EDDIE WOOD CONTINUED – “This is the only business in the world where I think it’s unpredictable. People that you never thought would work for you or drive for you or whatever. I mean, look at Richard Childress and Kyle Busch. They had a fistfight and now Kyle races for Richard. You can be mad today and you’re over it tomorrow. That’s one thing in racing that you get over being upset or whatever you want to be really quickly because nobody cares. Everybody moves on and racing just kind of overshadows any emotional parts. You’ve got to because the race cars won’t wait and you have to go.”
LEN WOOD CONTINUED – “There’s no driver that’s driven for us before that doesn’t come around to our hauler or come by to speak. No matter where we see them, all of our relationships are like once you’re part of the family, you’re part of the family.”
EDDIE WOOD CONTINUED – IS IT DIFFERENT GOING THROUGH THE EXPERIENCE WITH A FIRST TIME WINNER? WAS THAT PART OF THE EMOTION AS WELL? “I think so. I was thinking about it the other day of the first time winners that we’ve had. It was Trevor, Elliott Sadler, Dale Jarrett, Kyle Petty, Harrison now, Blaney, Tiny Lund in 1963 he won the Daytona 500 the first time out. Winning a first race with someone, a young man like that, that’s just a double win. That’s why it was so important. When I said winning kind of fixes everything, whatever bad races you’ve had or whatever, you forget all that stuff. Winning fixes everything.”
JON WOOD CONTINUED – “And Harrison really is one of those guys that you just want him to do good so bad. He’s just got that personality, that respect, self-respect. He’s just one of those people that you can’t not like, and so for us it’s been double hard with making this change for next year because you just want him to do good so bad, and that applies to whatever ride or whatever car he ends up in next year. You still just want it so bad for him because you can see it in him and you can see it in his eyes and he’s just a good kid.”
EDDIE WOOD CONTINUED – “You just want to hug him. I said that the other night. When he walks in a room, you want to walk on over there and hug him. That’s just the way it is.”
LEN WOOD CONTINUED – WHAT WILL THE FEELING BE LIKE AT DARLINGTON BECAUSE YOU’RE ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR LAST RACE? “I think the first race last year we finished sixth. There was an accident near the end and we were hoping to restart third and they lined us up sixth, so you never know until they cross that start-finish line at the end.”
EDDIE WOOD CONTINUED – “The way I look at it is we were fortunate enough to win a race Saturday night and you get to enjoy that until you get to Darlington. When they start unloading the cars, ‘OK, that race is over.’ You’re back like everybody else. Everybody is looking to win the next week and you get to enjoy it that long, though.”
LEN WOOD CONTINUED – “And we actually had a Sunday extra there. We had one more day.”
