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Press Release

This weekend at Darlington Raceway, Denny Hamlin’s No. 11 car will sport a special paint scheme honoring Hall of Fame member Cale Yarborough. The Timmonsville, SC native won 55 races in a car numbered 11.


Yarborough also won 13 races in a car numbered 21 and fielded by the Wood Brothers of Stuart, VA.


Yarborough had just one victory in the series, now known as Sprint Cup – on the half-mile dirt track in Valdosta, GA – when he was hired by the Woods midway through the 1966 season.


He scored his first major victory the next year, when he sat on the pole and won at Atlanta. It wasn’t until 1968 that he began to deliver the kind of results that Ford executive Charlie Gray had in mind, when he convinced the Woods to put the relatively inexperienced Yarborough in their potent No. 21 Fords and Mercurys.


Yarborough won the Daytona 500 and the Firecracker 400 at Daytona. He won the spring race at Atlanta and the first Martinsville race.


The fifth of his six wins that season, in the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway; however, was a special one for both driver and team.


It was the first of five victories at this home track for Yarborough, and the first of eight at Darlington for the Wood Brothers.


Leonard Wood, the team’s crew chief in those days, recalled that Yarborough was sick heading into one of the most grueling races on the schedule.


“He had the flu or something,” Wood said. “You can look at his picture in the Winner’s Circle and tell that he was under the weather.”


While the driver wasn’t feeling up to par, his car was. He qualified on the outside pole and led the first 16 laps.


Wood said that; then and now, the secret to success at Darlington, is having a fast car from the time it’s unloaded.


“You set your wedge and handling like you think it ought to be.” Wood said. “If you didn’t hit it right on the money in the first practice, you wound up working for it.


“Most of the time if you weren’t right when you got there, you didn’t get it right; but that time we hit it right on the money, and he ran well all day.”


Yarborough led 169 of the 364 laps that day, but his biggest challenge came from a fellow South Carolinian who would go on to drive the No. 21 – David Pearson.

As was his style, Pearson, driving the Holman-Moody Ford, stalked Yarborough as the laps began to wind down. When he made his move at Lap 320, the two cars touched. Yarborough bounced off the guardrail while Pearson spun into the grass.


“It didn’t knock Cale out,” Wood said. “He kept on getting it.”


Even though the caution flag never flew, Pearson caught Yarborough again, but was unable to wrestle the lead from him.


In his post-race comments, as reported in Greg Fielden’s Forty Years of Stock Car Racing, Yarborough credited his victory to a decision by the Woods to switch brands of tires early in the race, even though it meant losing two laps.


“The tire change was the key to our victory,” he said.


Leonard Wood said changing tire brands in mid-race isn’t as radical as it sounds today.

“That was kind of common in those days,” he said. “If one set of tires was doing better than the other, you just switched.” 


Wood said when Yarborough was driving the No. 21, the hard-charging style he showed that day at Darlington was always evident.


“There was never a need to put the ‘Go’ sign on the pit board,” Wood said. “He ran hard all the time. He was a go-getter as far as giving it all he had every lap. He really wanted to win, and he was strong physically, and determined. Yarborough was driven to win and didn’t like losing at all. At Daytona in July of ’67, there was a rain delay late in the race. We were in fourth place, and I would have been happy if it had rained out; be he said, ‘Oh no, there are three more spots up there’ and he went out and won the thing on the restart.”


Wood said in the years since, Yarborough, who was named Ford’s Man of the Year in 1968, has remained close to his old team.


“He’s always been an A-Number-One friend,” Wood said. “He was when we had him as a driver. We never had any arguments, not one disagreement.”


Photos and story from Wood Brothers Racing

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NASCAR Press Release


First Southern 500 Featured 75 Cars, Many Driven To Track Then Home Again

NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series history began in Charlotte, NC on June 19, 1949 with Jim Roper’s victory in a 150-mile race over the 3/4-mile dirt Charlotte Speedway.


The foundations of the modern sport, however, were poured the following year with the opening of Darlington Raceway in South Carolina. The track’s 63rd running of the Bojangles’ Southern 500 is set for Saturday night on FOX at 7pm ET.


Before Harold Brasington’s then 1.25-mile track was built – a year-long process – asphalt race tracks were virtually unheard of in the southeastern United States. The Strictly Stock Series competed on paved ovals only twice pre-Darlington, at the 1/2-mile Dayton Speedway in Ohio although Daytona’s Beach & Road Course surface was a combination of pavement and sand.


Darlington, however, was the game-changer leading to construction of paved, banked superspeedways – tracks measuring a mile or longer – over the next decade in Daytona Beach, FL, Charlotte and Atlanta. 


More than 80 cars from all points of the compass turned out for the Sept 4, 1950 Southern 500, driven rather than towed in many cases from small Carolina towns a few miles from the track and more than 2,500 miles distant. Qualifying for the 75-car field took two weeks as Brasington mimicked events leading up to the Indianapolis 500.

1950 Johnny Mantz Southern 500 Winner

Johnny Mantz, a 31-year-old from Long Beach, CA, drove a six-cylinder Plymouth to a nine-lap victory over Fireball Roberts in a race that took more than six and a half hours to complete. Much of the race was run on the track’s flat apron because the banking was rough and abrasive and quickly wore tires down to the cords.


Mantz’s Plymouth, jointly owned by Hubert Westmoreland and Bill France Sr, was the only car in the field equipped with special Firestone racing tires that lasted all day. While his competitors were in the pits for tire changes, Mantz only had to stop periodically for fuel – leading to his enormous margin of victory. He averaged 75.25-mph – not much slower than Curtis Turner’s 82.034-mph pole speed.


Many of those competing in the first Southern 500 are deceased including top four finishers Mantz, Roberts, the season’s champion to be Bill Rexford and 1949 champion Red Byron.


Still living are Cotton Owens, now 87 and a NASCAR Hall of Fame nominee, who finished seventh in a Plymouth. Hershel McGiff, racing the same Oldsmobile 88 with which he’d won the year’s inaugural Carrera Pan American – Mexican Road Race – was eighth. McGiff competed in several NASCAR K&N Pro Series events in 2011 at the age of 84.


America was a far different place five years after the end of World War II. There was little infrastructure, especially in the south, no Interstate highways and not much in the way of hotels in such rural areas as Darlington, SC.


Gasoline cost 18 cents a gallon, a new car, which could be raced in the Southern 500 without modification, went for $1,510 and the average annual salary was $3,210. The price of a black and white television set was $249.95 but it was unlikely you’d find auto racing programming on the few available channels.

Legends of NASCAR Cotton Owens

Owens, whose crew was comprised with relatives and friends, had begun racing close to home with a Chrysler dragged from a wrecking yard. His friends included NASCAR Hall of Famer Walter “Bud” Moore. He “commuted” to the track each day – a three-hour drive – from his home in Union, SC.


McGiff met France and Turner at the Mexican race. “Bill invited me to come to Darlington,” said McGiff, who raced in California, Oregon and Washington. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have known about it.”


McGiff drove his Oldsmobile cross country from Portland, OR, a distance of more than 2,600 miles sharing driving duties with his owner/mechanic Ray Sundstrom. “I slept two or three nights on the county courthouse lawn and went into the bathroom to clean up,” said McGiff, then 22 years of age.


The race itself was spectacular – if only because so many cars were confined to a relatively small space. McGiff remembers the field being lined up and stretching all the way around to turns 3 and 4. “I can’t imagine how they scored them,” he said. “You could go 10 deep the track was so wide. We ran on the flat (apron). You could run on the top part (banking) and go faster but you wouldn’t run far.”


The race was an endurance contest as much in the pits as on the track.


McGiff had found three or four volunteers at a local gas station to service his car. Changing a tire required a heavy floor jack and a lug wrench – air guns and lightweight jacks came to stock car racing much later. Gas was dumped into the car through a funnel.


Mantz, meanwhile, kept up a consistent pace content to let the faster, eight-cylinder cars wear out their tires. McGiff changed 14 – at $15 a tire – “Then we’d go by him like he was standing still.” said McGiff, who completed 374 of the 400 laps and was paid $500.


And afterwards? “I got back in the car and drove home,” said McGiff. “I didn’t get any dents. There was so much room that if a guy wrecked in front of you, you could stop.” Today’s Darlington racing, where speeds exceed 180-mph, obviously is not your grandfather’s Southern 500.


Owens went on to win nine times as a driver and 38 races as an owner. NASCAR Hall of Famer David Pearson drove Owens’ No. 6 Dodge to the 1966 NASCAR Sprint Cup championship. “His hobby was his love, he got to do it as a living and we did it as a family,” said Debbie Davis, Owens’ daughter.


McGiff, named one of NASCAR’s 50 Greatest Drivers in 1998, won four times and finished sixth in 1954 standings. Offered one of Carl Kiekhaefer’s potent Chrysler 300s for the 1955 season, McGiff instead chose to stay in Oregon to run the family’s lumber business.

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