When the shiny, white 18-wheeler hauler carrying the No 21 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Fusion pulled out of the team’s shop near Charlotte, N.C., and headed to Las Vegas Motor Speedway for this weekend’s Kobalt 400, it was just another routine trip for a modern-day NASCAR team.
But back in the day, the trips to tracks out west were far more adventurous; maybe not as much as in the covered wagon days, when the pioneers headed west to settle a new world, but true adventures nonetheless.
Eddie and Len Wood, two of the current co-owners of the Motorcraft/Quick Lane team, will travel to Las Vegas by commercial airliner this weekend, making a trip in a few hours that once took them several days.
In the 1970s and 1980s, they were responsible for getting the No. 21 Fords to faraway tracks like Riverside International Raceway and Ontario Motor Speedway in California. They made those trips in a Ford C-750 cab-over truck with a one-person sleeper. Like any self-respecting racers, they tuned their hauler for speed and endurance.
“It had a 460-cubic-inch engine with a tunnel ram intake manifold and two four-barrel carburetors,” Eddie Wood said. “We could run just as fast uphill as we could downhill.”
But with that kind of engine tuning, they couldn’t pass too many truck stops, even with the fuel contained in saddle tanks mounted on both sides of the truck.
In true Wood Brothers fashion, they had their “pit stops” perfected. Just like the Woods’ over-the-wall crew that revolutionized the NASCAR pit stop, Eddie, Len and their fellow travelers knew how to get in and out of a gas station in a hurry.
“We treated it just like a pit stop,” Eddie Wood said. “We’d always watch the signs on the road and make our stops at a station that had a McDonald’s or Dairy Queen. We’d pull between two pumps so we could fill both tanks at the same time, then one would go in, pay for the fuel, call home and another would get the food and we’d be on our way.”
Len Wood, as is his nature, kept meticulous records of their trip in a black notebook.
Their record trip home from the West; from Ontario, Calif., to Stuart, Va., – took just 34 1/2 hours. “It would take 48 if you drove like you’re supposed to,” Eddie Wood said. “But on that particular trip we were only off the road for 50 minutes, and that included going through weigh stations, stopping for fuel, bathroom breaks and everything.”
On the road, the Wood team passed the time listening to 8-track tapes of comedian Gene Tracy, who had a series of “Truck Stop” tapes.
“We listened to them over and over and laughed at the same jokes every time we heard them,” Wood said. “It sounds like it was a grind, but traveling was way more fun during that time period than it is now.”
Those long-ago trips out west also offered chances to experience a part of the country far different from the rural foothills of Virginia where the Woods grew up.
On one trip, Eddie Wood and his father Glen Wood had time on their hands after a race at Riverside was delayed by a week because of rain. So they got in their rental car and headed out to explore Death Valley. Of course they could not resist when they saw signs for the “racetrack”.
`“We turned off on a gravel road,” Wood said. “There were huge rocks there, and you couldn’t turn around.”
“I remember my dad saying: ‘I can understand you doing something this dumb, but I can’t believe I did it.’”
So they kept going, eventually coming to a dry lake bed between the Cottonwood and Last Chance mountain ranges. They found the “racetrack”, where rocks on the surface move for reasons not fully understood, leaving tracks as if made by an automobile.
“We kept on going and finally came upon some better dirt roads than we’d been on and eventually to a convenience store,” Wood said. “My dad told the folks there that we sure were glad to see them. They just laughed. We obviously weren’t the first ones to wander off in there and wonder if we’d get back to civilization before we ran out of gas.”
The Woods’ trips west also carried them to Las Vegas, which was a “can’t miss” detour when racing at Riverside and Ontario.
The NASCAR crowd, including the Woods, always got first-class treatment at Vegas, and that was long before the current superspeedway was ever envisioned.
Mel Larson, a part-time NASCAR racer and big-time mover and shaker in Vegas, saw to that.
“Circus Circus was the place to go, and you were supposed to make reservations way in advance because they were hard to get,” Wood said. “But Mel always saw to it that we had rooms there.”
Larson ran 47 races in the series now known as Sprint Cup, with two career poles and a best finish of second in a 1960 race at Phoenix, also was one of the people who pushed hard to bring Sprint Cup racing to Vegas. That makes races like this weekend’s Kobalt 400 special to the Woods.
“We’re excited to get back to the track at Las Vegas,” Wood said. “It’ll be our first race with the new package for downforce cars and our first time on that kind of track with our new partnership with Team Penske.”
To prepare for Las Vegas, Jeremy Bullins, the crew chief of the Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Fusion, traveled to Atlanta Motor Speedway last week to study the debut of the new rules package. One of the things he took away from Atlanta is the importance of getting the No. 21 Fusion through inspection for qualifying in time to make a qualifying attempt, especially since the team does not have a provisional starting spot to fall back on. At Atlanta, 13 teams, including the four that missed the race, did not get through inspection in time to get on the track, even with a 15-minute extension from NASCAR.
“Getting ready to qualify is an important thing for everybody, but it’s especially important for us,” Wood said.
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