Wood Brothers' return to NASCAR relevance: 'Faster than we've ever been'

There was a time not that long ago that Jon Wood, president of NASCAR‘s Wood Brothers Racing, dreaded having to go to the racetrack.

“I used to look for any excuse that I could to not have to come Sunday,” Wood told ESPN.

He would use his children’s activities as an excuse. It was family time he didn’t want to miss, considering how young they are, which made for an accurate-yet-convenient alibi.

“But I would look for any reason to be able to not go to the racetrack because I knew that I would leave (it) frustrated,” Wood elaborated, “and know we were better than the day we had.”

Harrison Burton, who drove the famed No. 21 car in 2024, was not to blame. Jeremy Bullins, his crew chief, was not to blame. Throughout the 2010s and 2020s, the organization tried to do more with less.

It often made them a bit irrelevant in the Cup Series despite their history as the longest-running team in the field. Wood Brothers once fielded cars for some of the most successful and recognizable names in NASCAR: Junior Johnson, Cale Yarborough, Donnie Allison and David Pearson, among others.

But to say that there have been lean years in the past few decades would be an understatement. Although the team never won a championship, it was a consistent winner, one of the most prominent in the sport. Wood Brothers Racing scored 96 victories between 1960 and 1993.

Then it went winless until 2001. The next didn’t come until 2011. Then 2017 — Burton’s win in the summer race at Daytona in 2024, the milestone 100th.

There were also years of instability in the driver’s seat, with multiple people getting time behind the wheel. The team didn’t run a full-time schedule between 2008 and 2015.

Burton, because of that win in 2024 that automatically put him in the postseason, ended the year in 16th, the lowest a playoff driver could finish in the standings. The win was one of only two top-ten finishes to go with Burton’s average finish of 25.7, and by Wood’s own admission, the team had no business being there and was not a 16th-place team.

And after the 2025 season? Another 16th-place finish in the standings from new driver Josh Berry and new crew chief Miles Stanley, but more importantly, with a clearly more competitive car every week. The results might come in flashes, but by the eye test, the No. 21 team is back, and they truly were a 16th-or-better team.

Berry won on merit at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, put together an average finish of 21.7, and earned the organization the most top-10s it has had since the 2020 and2021 seasons (eight). He also led more than 200 laps.

“I talk to (team CEO) Eddie Wood frequently, and both of us were pleasantly surprised with how well the season started, and how quickly Josh got up to speed with the team,” Edsel Ford II, great-grandson of Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, which has had a relationship with Wood Brothers Racing dating back to 1981, told ESPN. “Unfortunately, the playoffs didn’t go very well, but that’s what makes racing so compelling. It’s not always going to go your way, but I firmly believe that NASCAR is better when the Wood Brothers are running up front and winning races. That being said, I’m as optimistic as I’ve ever been about what lies ahead for them in the future.”

That optimism is shared within Wood Brothers Racing.

“Now, I’m not going to say I’m the first one to the airplane Sunday morning, but I don’t not want to go,” Wood said. “I would not trade where we are to be in a position of some of the other teams who have had consistent 18th-place finishes and they’re 18th in points. I would rather be where we are and have flashes of absolutely crazy performances and then crash or have a wheel fall off or a battery go dead.”

Those crazy performances are being celebrated elsewhere in the NASCAR garage. Ryan Blaney, who won the Cup Series in 2023, recognizes the importance of the historic team that he drove for between 2015 and 2017 running at the front again.

“I think it’s really important (for the team to be relevant in the series), and I think Josh has done a great job, and I’ve been so happy with their performance this year and seeing all that grow, and I think they’re going to get better and better,” he told ESPN. “I think it’s important because they’re racers. It’d be like asking if Richard Petty wasn’t around anymore, if he wasn’t still a part of the sport, what would that be like? It would feel a little hollow if you didn’t see that red and white (Wood Brothers) car out on the racetrack.”

Wood Brothers Racing finished inside the top 10 in points once between 2016 and 2024: when Blaney won in 2017, carrying the team on a postseason run. But once Blaney left the team to go in-house at Team Penske, which has an alliance with Wood Brothers, the results started to dip again.

A 15.8 average starting position for Berry in 2025 was just the third time in the past seven seasons the team has accomplished as much. Berry’s three top-ten finishes were the first time since 2021 that the team earned more than one in a season.

As for that eye test of how they are more relevant, NASCAR’s loop data statistics help drive home the point. Berry & Co. were inside the top 20 in green flag speed, laps run in the top 15 and quality passes, while they were inside the top 15 for fastest on restarts. And by the end of the season, Berry had a top-20 driver rating.

“I wish we had started slower and gotten the same results that we got, but later,” Wood said. “I think it created a false sense of having it together when we still had to grow. The first few races looked crazy good, and then we had road courses, difficult races, and races we should have struggled in, and it showed that we still have some growing to do. So, it was good to get that win out of the way … but I think it would have been easier if we had had a more upward trajectory than the ups and downs.

“In the end, I still think we’re outperforming where any of us expected we would be. We’re faster than we’ve ever been, but we have things happen that shouldn’t and that won’t eventually. So, there are kinks to iron out.”