Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Homestead Midweek Media Availability
Thursday, March 20, 2025

Earlier today, Wood Brothers Racing unveiled their paint scheme for Darlington’s Throwback Weekend and it highlights the No. 82 Lotus that Jim Clark drove to victory in the 1965 Indianapolis 500. That race also featured the Wood Brothers serving as the team’s pit crew. Members of the team participated in a media call from The Henry Ford in Dearborn, MI, to discuss the scheme and also the reaction to Josh Berry’s win on Sunday in Las Vegas.

JOSH BERRY, No. 21 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Mustang Dark Horse – WHAT ARE THE FEELINGS YOU HAVE AFTER WINNING SUNDAY AND NOW WITH THIS DARLINGTON ANNOUNCEMENT? “It’s been a big week. Obviously, a lot of fun. I’d say coming here today is a lot more fun knowing that we won Sunday, so it’s just been awesome to be here and to see everything. I’m looking forward to spending some more time here eventually and checking out some more of the history of this museum, but, overall, it’s been an amazing week – such a big moment on Sunday. I’ve just been trying to soak it in as much as you can and ready to go after it again on Sunday.”

JON WOOD, President, Wood Brothers Racing – WHAT HAS THE WEEK BEEN LIKE FOR YOU? “It has been a tremendously busy few days. Len summarized it the best – winning brings on a whole new set of problems, but they’re problems that you want to have. For a small team like us, we don’t have the staff to lean on to do everything from merchandise approvals to the media aspect of it. It’s just the five or six of us that you see, so it’s been a week.”

EDDIE WOOD, Chief Executive Officer, Wood Brothers Racing. “It really has. When Harrison won at Daytona for the 100th win, that was huge, big, the biggest thing ever. This seems to be at another level. I don’t really know why, but it seems like we’ve heard from so many people, me especially from people that I went to school with. I’m talking about first graders that I’ve heard from some of them recently, but some of them I hadn’t heard from in 40 or 50 years. It seems like everything about it is really happy and positive. Josh drove such a good race and it just felt good. I don’t have another way to put it. It just felt good.”

JON WOOD CONTINUED – HOW DID THIS THROWBACK SCHEME COME ABOUT? “Ian Moye from Team Penske works in the marketing department, but he approached me last year and said, ‘I’ve got a really cool idea for you. We think it would be neat if you could somehow do a Jim Clark throwback and maybe run it at the Brickyard.’ ‘OK, that would be awesome.’ But it never materialized. We never could pull it off and coordinate it, and we sort of put it on the backburner, and then this year rolls around and it’s our 75th and somebody, I don’t even know who mentioned that it’s the 60th anniversary of that win, so if there ever was an appropriate time, this was it. Darlington is a place where you celebrate motorsports history. It doesn’t have to be NASCAR history, it’s just the history of motorsports and I think we’ve been sort of trained to think that we have to do David Pearson throwbacks and Richard Petty throwbacks and that’s what matters, and it does, but there are other parts of our motorsports history and just history alike that are impactful, that it mattered, that makes that Darlington race as special as it is, so, for those reasons, there’s no better place to run this scheme, this livery they call it, than Darlington.”

IS THERE ANY OTHER THROWBACK PAINT SCHEME YOU’D LIKE TO DO AT SOME POINT? “We’ve got some cool ones coming. The next one would probably be the All-Star Race, I think. It’s awesome that Motorcraft gives us the flexibility to do these. There are lots of sponsors that shy away from altering their logos and their branding and they don’t want us to venture out from their normal colors. Motorcraft and DEX both have been awesome at just saying, ‘Go for it. Whatever you guys think.’ And today is an example of why, I think, that out of the box thinking is beneficial.”

JOSH BERRY CONTINUED – WINNING DOES TAKE YOU TO ANOTHER LEVEL. DO YOU EXPECT PEOPLE TO RACE YOU ANY DIFFERENTLY NOW? “I think the first part of that question, without a doubt I feel like I had things to prove. Obviously, coming off of last year and everything we went through, I think people were still looking at all four of us that were part of that program with a lot of question marks, so, to me, I wanted to go out and prove myself all over again in the Cup Series. I felt like this was probably the opportunity for me. I think if I fail at this one, I don’t think there’s probably another one lined up for me, so most definitely there was pressure to go out and perform. During the offseason we just really buckled down and obviously getting to know and working with my new crew chief, Miles. We put in a lot of work over the offseason to be prepared when the season started and I feel like that obviously paid off. Honestly, our results and performance has exceeded our expectations, so I’m super happy with that and winning a race in the Cup Series is a big deal. The second part of your question, I don’t know that anything will really change much from my side of things. I think that time will tell, but, ultimately, I’m just ready to get on to the next few weeks and excited to see what opportunities we’ll have.”

EDDIE WOOD CONTINUED – EVEN BESIDES THE WIN YOU HAVE HAD A GOOD START TO THE SEASON. DO YOU TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THAT BY DOING SOMETHING EXTRA NOW? DO YOU ADD SOMETHING OR DO YOU PUT MORE PEOPLE ON CARS OR DO YOU RIDE WITH WHAT YOU’VE GOT ALREADY? “I heard Josh and Miles discussing how you approach races from now until the end of the regular season, and I think you’re really able to race differently because you’ve already got a win, hopefully that locks us in, but I think you can take more chances that you’d normally probably wouldn’t take. You can go after the playoff points, which is different from stage points, so you concentrate on that because you’re stacking up a cushion. I remember, I think it was the year before last or even before that, but Truex had so many points that he was able to point his way almost all the way to the end. He may have gotten to the end, but I think that’s the way you look at it is to build that cushion and you can take chances – like maybe I pit and maybe I don’t. Maybe get two tires. You can do that with more confidence. If it doesn’t go right, that’s OK because you’ve already got this in the bank.”

JOSH BERRY CONTINUED – DO YOU FEEL YOU’VE DONE A GOOD JOB OF SOAKING THIS IN AND ENJOYING THE MOMENT OF WINNING ON SUNDAY? “Honestly, yeah. I think it kind of even goes back to our celebration and the Polish Victory Lap and the run down the frontstretch and the time spent there. That’s the biggest thing I was trying to accomplish there was to collect my emotions the most I could and soak up that moment and enjoy it. I felt like it’s been a busy week without a doubt, but we’ve had a lot of opportunities, we’ve had great conversations with a lot of people in the industry to reflect on my journey here and what this moment really means, so aside from wishing my daughters were there, I think that’s probably the one thing that I hate out of the whole deal, I guess, is that they weren’t there. McKenzie told me, which is my oldest daughter, she’s like, ‘Well, you’ve got to do it again because I’ve got to be there.’ So, I guess that’s the plan. When you ask what’s next, we’ve got to go out and do it again because she wants to go to Victory Lane and be a part of that, so, I don’t know. It’s hard to say, but this is a big deal. Chase Briscoe texted me probably the best thing. He’s like, ‘Hey, winning a Cup race is a pretty big deal, isn’t it,’ and it really is, and doing it with these guys just makes it that much more special. They deserve every bit of success that they get and we’re gonna keep working hard to keep having more days like Sunday.”

EDDIE WOOD CONTINUED — FOR A TEAM THAT IS IN YOUR SITUATION, WHAT DOES GROWTH LOOK LIKE? “In our world, through the years, it’s hard to plan very far ahead in racing. I mean, you guys are aware of that because in our racing partners and relationships, things like that, we survive on sponsorship. Everybody does and it’s hard to predict the future because so many things that affect it, just things that have nothing to do with racing that affects it. Racing and things around racing and the people, so our goal, my goal, I’m the oldest, so my goal would be just to keep going. 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 gonna work out, but you keep grinding away at it day after day. I think taking it a day at a time, 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.”

LEN WOOD, Chief Operating Officer, Wood Brothers Racing – “I think another thing we did was early last year we kind of changed everybody’s roles. 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 sitting off the camera here and he’s 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.”

JON WOOD CONTINUED – “Landon Cassill, this tells you how far back this goes, and that’s indicative of how much it stuck in my mind. Landon was working on building a team with Mike Hillman, or he was with Mike Hillman at this point in time. I’m guessing that was around 2015, 2016 or 2017. We were talking a lot back and forth and he texted me and asked what our business plan was. I thought about that for a minute and what business plan? That’s not how we do things. We just get it done, but it bothered me enough that I remember it that I had no answer, and I thought at the time, ‘Well, we’re doing this wrong. If Landon is asking me just one simple question and I can’t answer it, what else are we doing wrong?’ Fast forward to today and I look back on that and I think how stupid it was for that to bother me because the way that they’ve run this business, these two, has been not just more successful than anybody else, but the most successful. Success, in my opinion, isn’t necessarily measured in the number of wins and championships. It’s longevity and how long you make it in this business and sport, and the mark that you make, and I feel like the mark that they’ve made probably competes with or tops any other teams relevance in NASCAR.”

SO IS THERE A BUSINESS PLAN? “No.”

LEN WOOD CONTINUED – “We do budgets all the time working with Aaron Rollins at Team Penske, so everybody is on the same page. When we do all that stuff, we make sure that everybody – Jon, Keven, Jordan, Kim, Eddie, everybody has all the information so if something happens to one of us, they can carry it on.”

JOSH BERRY CONTINUED – RYAN BLANEY WAS VERY COMPLIMENTARY OF HOW YOU HAVE FIT IN WITH THE GROUP. HOW DO YOU FEEL YOU’VE FIT INTO THE GROUP AND DO YOU FEEL LIKE AN EQUAL EVEN THOUGH YOU’RE WITH TWO CUP CHAMPIONS? “I think, for me, this opportunity when we first sat down from the start, aside from just how I fit in as a driver and a person and the branding and the old school kind of grassroots feel that I feel like me driving for the Wood Brothers, and I think the feeling with Team Penske and gaining access to meetings and the data and the knowledge – those things were the most important to me to grow as a driver. Ultimately, I hadn’t experienced that – experience similar like that with my fill-in role at Hendrick Motorsports and getting to be a part of that and being able to learn and lean on Kyle and Chase and Alex and William. To me, I felt like that I was going into a similar situation that I had everything at my disposal to go out and succeed, so that’s a big part of it – having those guys, teammates more or less, and being able to lean into them and their experience, but as well as just the organization as a whole and their success, to me, it brings a lot of confidence to me as a driver that I have what I need to go out and be successful. I don’t think, from my side of things, I feel comfortable talking about what I’m feeling and what I think. A lot of times we all are feeling and seeing the same things and I want to be a part of that. Yeah, it’s been a great relationship so far, so I’m excited to see what the future holds.”

EDDIE WOOD CONTINUED – WHAT HAS EDSEL FORD MEANT AND THE ROLE HE PLAYED FOR YOU GUYS TO GET THROUGH THAT ROUGH PERIOD AND GET TO THIS POINT? “I’ve told that story about being at Pocono testing and Edsel calls looking for a phone number and he asked me, he said, ‘How come I haven’t heard anything from you? Where have you been?’ And I said, ‘Mr. Ford, we’ve run so bad I’m actually ashamed to call you.’ And his exact words were, ‘You’re telling me my 21 is broken?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir. It’s pretty well broken.’ We missed the 500. We missed the Brickyard. I think we missed the 600. We missed three or four of the first five or six races and a couple of them were because of rain, but most of them we just missed them. He said, ‘Well, I’m gonna have someone call you in the morning and we’re gonna fix this.’ We were in Pocono, so at 10:10 the next morning the phone rings and it’s Jim Farley. Mr. Farley had just went to work for Ford Motor Company a few months earlier after coming from Toyota and he introduced himself. He said, ‘Why don’t you guys come up to Dearborn fast.’ So we left the racetrack. We had t-shirts and jeans and tennis shoes on. We went and got on a plane four hours later from Wilkes Barre into Detroit and something called Mr. Farley out of town at the last second when we got there. This was on probably a Wednesday afternoon, so we go buy clothes. We went to that mall off of Big Beaver Road in Troy, bought clothes and we got to see Mr. Farley Friday night. We went to Ford World Headquarters and told him what was going on and what we thought we needed and he said, ‘OK, it starts now.’ And we had increased engineering help and things started to come together. It wasn’t one particular thing, but from that day forward things started to get better and we talked constantly with Jim. 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. That just shows what kind of commitment that Ford Motor Company has always had. The same thing happened to our dad in 1956. He was running convertibles and almost went out of business. 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. 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’s kept us going.”

JON WOOD CONTINUED – WAS THERE EVER A CONCERN DURING THAT PERIOD THAT THERE WASN’T GOING TO BE A FAMILY BUSINESS FOR YOU AND YOU’D HAVE TO GO OUT AND GET A REAL JOB? “Fortunately, I didn’t know it. I don’t know why they didn’t tell me, but they didn’t. Until they told that story years later, I had no idea those things happened and not that it would have changed anything because, I mean, when you’re at that point, when you’re that desperate, but then at the same point you’re dealing with guys that are as high level as Edsel and Jim Farley, what else can you do? What good would it be for them to tell me? I couldn’t build it faster. I couldn’t be anymore of a help to the race team and contribute any better to suddenly start making races. We just were where we were and it was beyond any one person’s ability to fix it.”

LEN WOOD CONTINUED – “I’ll say this, years ago our dad had a Lincoln-Mercury dealership and it was in Danville, Virginia, about 60 miles from Stuart. We always talked about if this racing turns bad, we can always go work at the dealership and then dad sold the dealership around ’92 or something like that and we’re still kicking.”

JON WOOD CONTINUED – DO THEY NOT ALLOW DOGS AT THE HENRY FORD MUSEUM? “No. I’m not saying I’m smart, but I’m smarter than to try to sneak the dogs into this place. They’ve been in some pretty no dogs allowed type of buildings before, but I would give pause before I would try to pull that stunt here.”

EDDIE WOOD CONTINUED – YOU HAVE TO GO BACK TO 1981 WHEN THE 21 TEAM WON MULTIPLE RACES IN A YEAR. IS THIS THE FIRST TIME YOU GUYS HAVE THE FEELING THAT IT’S POSSIBLE AGAIN? “Yes. Actually, you think about it. I think it gets back to you take it a day at a time, a race at a time, a weekend at a time. But, right now, with the way Josh and Miles are working together and the team as a whole, all of the Fords are fast right now and anything is possible. I think that’s one beautiful part about NASCAR racing is that anything can happen and it will, you just never know. Last week, I was sitting there watching the whole thing unfold and I was gonna be happy with a top 10. I thought, ‘That would be good.’ And then as it began to get close to the end Josh got closer and closer to the front and there we were. At the end with starting from the outside, just like Harrison started the race at Daytona on the outside. I was like, ‘this thing might work out too. You never know.’ You sit there and watch Josh driving in his first year and it was really, really important to me for him to win his first race in our car. That’s a big deal to me. There have been a lot of others that we’ve helped start their careers as far as winning. If you win that first race, it’s different. Once you win that race, it changes. Josh can speak to that. It’s like, Monday morning it was different waking up because you won a race and now you can kind of go on with your business, get down to it you win more races, but that was probably the most special thing to me was Josh getting his first win with us.”

JOSH BERRY CONTINUED – WHAT ARE YOUR EXPECTATIONS GOING INTO THE PLAYOFFS AND WHAT DO YOU SEE AS YOUR BIGGEST OBSTACLE? “I think for us in the immediate future we want to keep building off of what we’ve had to start this year and iron out some issues we’ve had. We’ve had a couple issues on pit road and here and there, but ultimately, the important part is the performance of myself and the performance of the car and I think we’re doing a lot of those things really good, so it’s just about going through these next couple months and work and prepare and try to keep it going. Once you get to the playoffs, I feel like anything can happen. The first couple rounds a lot of times are simply about survival and execution, so I don’t see any reason why it would be any different this year. If we can get to that point, it would obviously be amazing to have more playoff points across the rest of the season, but once we get there it’s gonna boil down to execution and staying out of trouble and getting stage points and good finishes and that’s what we’re doing right now. There’s really no use in overthinking it too much. I think just keep plugging away and learning and getting better, and I think there’s a lot of great days ahead of us.”

WHAT WAS THE EXPERIENCE LIKE FROM THE XFINITY PLAYOFFS AND HOW DO YOU TRANSLATE THAT TO CUP? “It’s similar, like I said, trying to survive the first couple rounds. For us in 2022, we were able to win at Las Vegas and punch our ticket to Phoenix. That next year was the opposite scenario. We were battling for the lead at Texas, wreck. Had a good race going at Bristol and we wrecked and then you’re in a hole and the party is over, so, for us, I’m not overthinking it too much at this point. Kind of like these guys said, how I’ve always raced is week to week and day to day and no matter what whether you win or you lose or whatever, you prepare the same every week to do the best you can and at this point that’s where we’re at with it. It’s obviously nice to have the win checked off and have that weight off our shoulders, but there’s still a lot of work ahead of us.”

Hustling Into Homestead
Cody Ware Putting in the Work Ahead of Straight Talk Wireless 400

MOORESVILLE, N.C. (March 20, 2025) – Cody Ware is hustling into Homestead-Miami Speedway. The Straight Talk Wireless 400 Sunday at the 1.5-mile oval culminates a whirlwind week for the driver of the No. 51 Jacob Construction Ford Mustang Dark Horse for Rick Ware Racing (RWR) and provides a glimpse into the life of a NASCAR Cup Series driver.

Ware touched down in Concord, North Carolina, shortly before 1 a.m. EDT on Monday after a six-hour flight back from Las Vegas, site of last Sunday’s race. He shook off the effects of jet lag and went about his routine of working out and downloading data from the race he had just run 14 hours earlier. Sleep beckoned even as the sky remained lit from the remnants of dusk, but the recommended eight hours of shuteye was cut short by a 4:30 a.m. wakeup call. Ware was on an early flight to Indianapolis on Tuesday to join his RWR counterpart in the NHRA Mission Food Drag Racing Series, Top Fuel driver Clay Millican, to speak with 500 Arby’s franchisees, and he needed to get to Charlotte-Douglas International Airport.

An all-day event stretched well into the evening, and after an even shorter sleep, Ware caught another early-morning flight out of Indianapolis on Wednesday and flew back to Charlotte. He drove straight from the airport to the RWR shop for his weekly team meeting, which was pushed back a day from its standard Tuesday slot to accommodate the trip to Indy.

The meeting was in-depth and covered not just the details from the prior race at Las Vegas, but the season to date. Homestead was a new opportunity, and everyone wanted to unlock its potential.

By 2 p.m., Ware was driving north on Interstate 85 to High Point, North Carolina, where he had an in-studio television interview with FOX Channel 8 reporter Chris Weaver. Around 3:15 p.m., Ware pulled into the lot. By 3:30 p.m., he was live on a recently launched show being streamed across Roku, Firestick and AppleTV on myFOX8+. Interaction with other personnel and a tour of the station followed. By 4:45 p.m., Ware was back on the road, returning home around 6 p.m.

Dinner, a decent night’s rest, and then another pre-dawn wakeup on Thursday followed, this time for a four-hour stint in the simulator at the Ford Performance Center in Concord, North Carolina. There, Ware and his crew chief, Billy Plourde, put into play much of what they had discussed in their team meeting the day before. With only 25 minutes of practice on Saturdays of race weekends followed by just a single qualifying lap, the simulator is an essential tool to finding a fast setup before the car even turns a wheel on the racetrack.

Ware hit the gym afterward, then got to enjoy an afternoon before packing up for his Friday flight to South Florida.

“Racing is all about what goes on Monday to Friday, even Friday to Saturday, and then Sunday is the fun part,” Ware said.

“I did get a chance to reset and reload toward the end of this week. It’s busy for a reason. We’ve got some work to do. It’s been a tough start to the year and we’ve got to start putting together some good results.”

Homestead is known as a driver’s track. It is a favorite among competitors, with its weathered asphalt, long straightaways and variable banking giving drivers options to search different racing lines while managing their tires.

“Homestead is super aggressive, super abrasive. It’s almost like Darlington times 10, where the track surface, after a lap or two, your tires are shot. Everyone’s got a terrible racecar 10 laps into a run. That’s why it’s a more driver-oriented track,” Ware said.

“It’s all about making the most of what you have. I think even the guy leading the race at Homestead is going to be complaining about how bad his car is, but he’s just the one who’s making the most of it.”

Ware will make the most of his track time at Homestead beginning at 1:05 p.m. on Saturday when practice begins for the Straight Talk Wireless 400. Qualifying is immediately afterward, and Ware will be the second of 37 drivers to turn a lap against clock and set his position for Sunday’s race. The 267-lap race goes green at 3 p.m. with live coverage on FS1 and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.

“Once you strap into the racecar, all the other outside noise goes away,” Ware said. “You’ve got your spotter up top, you’re working with your crew chief, so it’s not a quiet place, but it’s my happy place, for sure. It’s where I feel the most comfortable and feel at home.”

About Rick Ware Racing:

Rick Ware has been a motorsports mainstay for more than 40 years. It began at age 6 when the third-generation racer began his driving career and has since spanned four wheels and two wheels on both asphalt and dirt. Competing in the SCCA Trans Am Series and other road-racing divisions led Ware to NASCAR in the early 1980s, where he finished third in his NASCAR debut – the 1983 Warner W. Hodgdon 300 NASCAR Grand American race at Riverside (Calif.) International Raceway. More than a decade later, injuries would force Ware out of the driver’s seat and into full-time team ownership. In 1995, Rick Ware Racing was formed, and with his wife Lisa by his side, Ware has since built his eponymous organization into an entity that competes full-time in the elite NASCAR Cup Series while simultaneously campaigning successful teams in the Top Fuel class of the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series, Progressive American Flat Track and FIM World Supercross Championship (WSX).