Wood Brothers shining in rare moment in playoffs spotlight
MARTINSVILLE, Va. — If the Wood Brothers need any advice for Sunday’s critical playoff race at Martinsville Speedway, the team can turn to family patriarch Glenn Wood.
Just 30 minutes up the road from the speedway, the Hall of Famer is still based in Stuart, the Virginia town where one of NASCAR’s oldest teams was formed. Wood is 92 now, only uses his iPhone to take pictures of trees he’s cut down on his land, but relies on technology to follow Ryan Blaney’s breakout season.
Wood, it turns out, records every race on a VCR. Then he calls sons Eddie and Len, who now run the team, to talk about the race.
“He’ll go back and analyze it and talk to us about it, like if we do something — we ran out of fuel somewhere and he was like, ‘Did you all think you were at Darlington?’” Eddie Wood said Saturday at Martinsville.
“He’s got his own little tape recorder and he’s got drawers and drawers of (tapes.) He never duplicates or never tapes over one he’s already got. He just gets new ones. I didn’t know you could still buy them ... but he analyzes all these races just like we all do.”
The whole gang expects to hear from Wood as the No. 21 Ford unexpectedly begins this third round of NASCAR’s playoffs. It’s not that Blaney doesn’t deserve to be in this elite round of eight, it’s just that few predicted the second-year Cup driver would make it this deep into the playoffs.
Blaney drove his way into this round a week ago at Kansas Speedway, where a penalty dropped him to 40th on the starting grid. But in a drive that Eddie Wood deemed worthy of David Pearson, the Hall of Famer who made this team so competitive so many decades ago, Blaney finished third. NASCAR TRUCK SERIES: Noah Gragson won his first career Truck Series race by passing two-time champion Matt Crafton on the final restart Saturday at Martinsville Speedway. Gragson, who is from Las Vegas, won for Kyle Busch Motorsports. Busch, who also is from Las Vegas, uses that team to groom young talent. Gragson is the 10th first-time Truck Series winner at Martinsville, and his victory denied a driver from earning an automatic berth in the championship race of the playoffs.
The race at Martinsville was the first in the round of six for the series. Two drivers will be eliminated from the field, and Gragson is not championship-eligible. FORMULA 1: Red Bull’s Max Verstappen edged Mercedes’s Lewis Hamilton in the final practice before qualifying at the Mexican Grand Prix in Mexico City on Saturday.
Red Bull has been fastest in two of the three practice sessions. Verstappen’s lap of 1 minute, 17.113 seconds topped Hamilton by 0.075 seconds at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez. Hamilton is aiming to win a fourth career Formula One season championship on Sunday and can do it if he finishes no worse than fifth. Hamilton has said he will race to win and a victory would be his 10th this season and sixth in the last seven races. Red Bull’s speed over the last two days in the high altitude of Mexico City shows the team is ready to make Hamilton work for the win. Hamilton has a 66-point over lead over title rival Sebastian Vettel of Ferrari, who was third the final practice.