LMS Media Tour: Wood Brothers, part 1

Charlotte LMS Media Tour: Wood Brothers Shop Visit

Ricky Rudd, driver of the No. 21 Motorcraft Genuine Parts Taurus, will be entering his third season as driver for the Wood Brothers, but it will be the first full season with crew chief Michael "Fatback" McSwain since the two worked together at Robert Yates Racing. The Wood Brothers Racing team held a Q&A session this morning at their shop as part of the Lowe's Motor Speedway media tour.

EDDIE WOOD , Co-Owner - No. 21 Motorcraft Genuine Parts Taurus

"I'm really proud of this race team. I'd like to thank Motorcraft, Ford Motor Company, the Air Force and Rent-A-Center. They've all stood behind us. We're better than we were a year ago and I think we're gonna be really good this year. I think we've got a shot at the top 10. I'd like to thank Ricky and Fatback for working together as well as they do. They really click."

RICKY RUDD - No. 21 Motorcraft Genuine Parts Taurus

THIS USED TO BE YOUR RACE SHOP, DIDN'T IT?

"It's really neat and definitely a unique situation the way it all turned out. It wasn't all planned. When I first started our race team in late '93 to get ready for the '94 season, we were in a building right next to Penske, which I guess was the Jasper Motor Company which was bought out by Penske, but we were in that rented building. A lot was going on in a short period of time, but we built this building from looking at the blueprints, getting together with architects and all that, so I was involved in this building from the very beginning. We were in this building from '94 to when we shut the team down and '99 was the last year we ran. There are good memories and bad memories. The bad memories is when I look out here and see all these chairs. That reminds me that this is about where they had the auction tables set up here. The auctioneer was up here and all the other people were sitting out there in the seats and that was a tough day. As a matter of fact, I stuck my head in the door and walked right back out. I had to leave. So there are a lot of blood, sweat and tears in this building. This floor here has probably been painted about three times and we sold it to Robert Yates and they re-painted it, but this original floor - just to tell you how involved we were - me and about two of my buddies paid a company to paint the floor and it didn't turn out right. So we're sitting in here on our butts literally sliding around. The people who painted it messed it up. There were little bubbles, like air bubbles you blow in chewing gum. There must have been about 10,000 of those bubbles and we had to cut them out with razor blades and get it done before the paint cured so we could put a top coat on it. So I've seen this shop from the inside-out I guess. I'm real happy to see the Wood Brothers in here. It was a great shop when we ran out of this building with the Yates organization. We had good success, and then Robert merged his two teams together and moved out of this building, which made it available to the Wood Brothers. It's been steadily going under a lot of improvements over the years, but there are good memories in this building. I'm just glad to be back in this building and it's kind of odd the way it turned out."

EDDIE WOOD:

TALK ABOUT THE DECISION TO MOVE FROM STUART, VA.

"It came up about a year ago in November. That's when it was first talked about. It was one of those things that people had talked about it, but you never really believed you would ever do it. One morning we got up and Len and I made up our mind that if we were gonna stay in this business, we probably needed to move to Charlotte. So that afternoon we decided that, 'OK, we're gonna follow it through.' It started right there just one morning. We got up and decided we were gonna do it and we did it. Like I said, early on last year we were behind just simply because we moved. We began to catch up mid-year and made some changes and then Fatback came on board with Hoyt (Overbagh), another engineer, and things started to click. If I hadn't been here and seen it with my own eyes everyday, I wouldn't believe the turnaround. I think if you added up the last 12 races, we probably would have been eighth or ninth in the points, which is pretty remarkable from where we started. I'm just really proud of that. Had I ever talked Fatback into coming to Stuart and staying for a little while, he would have moved up there and we would have been done - we'd still be there. But it was hard. His roots are down here and the way things worked out, it's worked out for us and him and everybody concerned, but he would have liked it up there. He's kind of a country boy and there's a lot of hunting and a lot of mountains and stuff up there he would have liked, but that's old news. We're here now and I'm just happy it's working as well as it is."

MICHAEL MCSWAIN , Crew Chief - No. 21 Motorcraft Genuine Parts Taurus

HOW ARE PREPARATIONS GOING?

"It's been a long winter. It's been a tough winter for me. I had a lot of things going on - the birth of our first child, a little work on myself - so I had a strong crew here getting a lot done. We made some plans for all that. Pretty much every car here has been taken all the way back to the bare frame - modifications made to the frame, improvements, new bodies, and we've done a lot of work in a short period of time. We were real happy with our Daytona test. We ran decent in qualifying speed, but we were really, really happy with the way our car was in race trim and it made the decision on what car to take back for Speedweeks. As far as next week, we've got three new cars going out there and from all of our preliminary aero studies, we're pretty excited about those cars also. We're definitely looking forward to the next few weeks."

LEONARD WOOD , Co-Founder - Wood Brothers Racing

THOUGHTS ON A FRANCHISE SYSTEM.

"First of all I want to comment about Eddie and Len being such good businessmen. I kind of rate myself as a mechanic and always worked on cars and stuff, but Glen and Eddie and Len are far ahead of me on the business side of it. I think they're doing a great job to keep this thing going as good as they have. As far as moving down here, when you're working on race cars, it doesn't really matter whether you're in New York or California, it's the same thing inside the building - the people you have if you had them at the same places. Of course, when you leave it's quite busy when you leave here with traffic and all, but I think things are going really well. We're really proud to have Fatback and he just works really good with Ricky. He knows a lot about race cars and that's what it's all about. You can train people on a computer or whatever to do things to race cars, but the bottom line is you've got to kind of know what a race car wants. You don't get that if you don't have the experience and Ricky and Fatback both have good experience, so I think things are going really well here and I'm looking forward to the season."

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF BEING IN CHARLOTTE?

"The benefit is that you've got a lot of access. Whether you realize it or not, you've got access to a lot of knowledge that is close by. You've got access to a lot of talent if somebody has to leave. If you need to replace them it's easier because there's a lot of talent in this area and a lot of them don't really want to move to Stuart, Virginia. So that's a great advantage to being down here."

RICKY RUDD:

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON RETIREMENT?

"Always a lot of thought was put into that. I guess it goes back a couple of years ago when I was with the Yates organization. It started back then and you start realizing that you're not gonna be doing this forever, so there's been a lot of thought put in it. Really, I try purposely to keep my life as simple as I possibly can - not a lot of side divertions or a whole lot of other racing going on, but just the Cup racing. I do that really on purpose to help keep focused so the burnout factor doesn't set in too much there. Physically, I feel great. I feel as good as I ever have. I couldn't be more happier with the way the cars are starting to respond and coming around - the way the cars are driving good. To me, that's what it's really all about is getting in a race car that drives really good. If it drives really good and runs good, then you've got a chance to go out and win a race or run up front. That's sort of what keeps me hanging around is the idea and knowing what's going on in this shop right now for the upcoming season is nothing but an improvement and built upon the way we finished last year. So I'm looking forward to the year and really just take it a year at a time. Obviously, I'm not gonna be here probably five or 10 years, but I feel I've got a couple more good years in me. I kind of look at it as we've got all the tools now that it takes. We've got the Yates motor program. We've got Fatback. We've got Hoyt. We've got all these good fabricators and mechanics in the shop. If we can't get it done and run up front this year, then you probably won't see me the next year. But if I'm competitive this year and we can go out and run up front and maybe win a race or two or make that top 10 and be a factor in that top 10 outfit at the end of the year, then you're probably gonna have to deal with me a couple more years."

DO YOU THINK THE SMALLER SPOILER WILL AFFECT YOUR DRIVING?

"I think people, even the young drivers you've got coming in today, everyone makes pretty quick adjustments. The cars will probably be a little freer. I've driven cars at Daytona that had 10 degrees of spoiler and raced them with 15 degrees of spoiler. Talk about loose, I mean literally down the backstretch when somebody drove up under your bumper, you'd hear the motor race up. It can't get much more lift or lighter in the back end than that, so I've driven the extreme opposite end of where we are today. The cars today are so nailed to the track that they're like slot cars. I would like to see them freed up a little bit and get them slipping and sliding a little bit. That's OK if you're slipping and sliding as long as everybody is slipping and sliding, but where you get in trouble is if you have a car that's not right on a particular day and your car is slipping and sliding and the other guys are stuck, then it's a long day. But if you've got everybody in the same basket and everybody is slipping and sliding, then those are fun days for me."

THOUGHTS ON THE NEW QUALIFYING SYSTEM WHERE THE TOP 35 ARE GUARANTEED STARTING SPOTS.

"To me, I think it's something that should have probably been done a long time ago. I heard franchising mentioned a while ago. Qualifying, to me, is such a distraction. It has absolutely nothing to do with the race itself. It's more of a media tool. I think it was created back in the days to get ink in the paper. You had to have something going on and it used to be that Thursday we'd qualify. Darlington was Thursday and a lot of tracks were Thursday. That was just to get exposure in the paper I guess before you got to all the stick and ball sports. In Saturday's paper you got a little pre-weekend ink and, hopefully, it generated interest and ticket sales. I think that's how qualifying was originally created. That was the thought process. From a competitor, I would rather go to the race track and spend nothing but whatever practice we've got working on race setup. But the way things have been, you haven't had that luxury. If you're not really solid in the points, I think we were 25th or 24th in the points at the end of the year, that's pretty much a secure position to be in for provisional situations, but I've seen guys 25th in the points miss the Daytona 500. So the end result is I think you're gonna see better, more competitive racing on race day because the top 35 are locked in. Qualifying is just a place to start. It is important for pit positions and stuff like that, don't get me wrong, but you can focus on race day stuff that's gonna make a difference. Instead of maybe seeing a couple of cars get stretched out in the race, you might see 10 guys run together the whole race that maybe you wouldn't have seen otherwise had it not been changed, so, yeah, I'm a big fan of the new format."

MICHAEL MCSWAIN:

DOES THAT CHANGE HOW YOU LOOK AT A WEEKEND?

"Yeah, it's changed it a lot. Of course we went to Daytona and put emphasis on qualifying, but we didn't put as much emphasis on it as we did in years past, and every race is gonna be that way. In today's scheduling and the way the weekend schedules are, the amount of practice time for race practice has been cut probably more than half - probably into a fourth of what it was three or four years ago - so I'm excited to see this new rule. I think it's gonna give everyone more practice time and more practice time is gonna equal to a more competitive race."

RICKY RUDD:

WILL THE IMPOUND PROCESS HELP PROVIDE A TRUE INDICATION OF WHICH CARS ARE THE BEST FOR THE RACE?

"That's probably more of a Fatback, crew chief question, but I can tell you that when you're in race trim, you won't have the trick shocks and all that type of stuff on your car. To me, it's gonna be more of a reflection of actually what you're gonna see in the race, but you've got to take that with a grain of salt because what we look for in our more successful days is that we go out and run a 20-lap run as all the teams do. A lot of times when you go out and run 20 laps, there might be a guy who is like a rabbit and can go out and run five laps fast enough to lap the whole field, but by lap seven and eight, he's a second off the pace. As teams, we tend to look at what you can do on a 20-lap run. Where are you at on lap 10, lap 15 and lap 20. To me, you can look at that on happy hour practice and pretty much tell who you're gonna race against. Going out in race trim for one lap, it's gonna be closer to what you're gonna see in racing, but, still, not like if you ran a 10-lap practice run and on the tenth lap they clocked your time and lined you up that way. That's pretty much an indication of who is gonna run up front and who is not."

Continued in part 2