Wood Brothers Claim 1963 Daytona 500, Owner’s Title

by Tom Jensen July 11, 2023

Tiny Lund’s surprise Daytona 500 victory helped the Stuart, Virginia-based Wood Brothers Racing team win the 1963 NASCAR owner’s championship.

In its infancy, NASCAR racing was much different than it is today. For some competitors in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, racing was a hobby to keep them entertained and out of trouble on the weekends.

For a select few individuals, though, racing became the family business, a way to put food on the table and keep the lights on, something that wasn’t easy for everyone in the hardscrabble South at the time.

One of those individuals determined to make racing a successful business was NASCAR Hall of Famer Glen Wood (Class of 2012), who in 1950 formed Wood Brothers Racing, which today stands as NASCAR’s oldest continually operating team.

In the 1950s, Glen Wood was one of several team drivers who raced in what is now the Cup Series. In those days, the Wood Brothers did not run the full schedule, opting to compete in a mixture of Cup, Modified and Convertible races, usually in proximity of their shop in Stuart, Virginia, and the nearby Martinsville Speedway.

The team entered just 47 Cup races from 1953-59, but once the 1960s arrived, they upped their schedule substantially. In 1960, for example, the Wood Brothers ran 22 races, by far their most ambitious schedule to date.

Just when it looked like the team might have to scale back for 1961 due to financial constraints, veteran Speedy Thompson drove the No. 21 Wood Brothers Ford to consecutive late-season victories at Charlotte Motor Speedway and Atlantic Rural Fairgrounds (now Richmond Raceway) in 1960. Those two victories helped the team keep going into the following year.

Now established as regular, although still not full-time, NASCAR participants, the Wood Brothers headed to Daytona Beach in February 1963 with plans to enter their No. 21 Ford Galaxie 500 for driver Marvin Panch. That plan went badly awry when Panch flipped his Maserati sports car during practice for a preliminary race at Daytona International Speedway.

Panch was trapped beneath the burning sports car just as Tiny Lund came driving through the tunnel at the exit of Turn 4. Lund, an out-of-work driver looking to catch on with a team as a mechanic, helped turn the car right-side-up and assisted in extricating Panch from the burning car.

Panch suffered serious but not life-threatening burns in the incident and was transported to Halifax Hospital in Daytona Beach to recuperate. From his hospital bed, Panch told Wood that Lund should be his replacement in the No. 21 Ford for the Daytona 500.

It was a bold suggestion.

Up to that point, Lund was winless in 132 Cup Series starts dating back to 1955. Prior to his crash, Panch was one of the Daytona 500 favorites, having won the Great American Race in 1961. Replacing Panch with a winless journeyman certainly was a calculated risk for the team.

But Wood agreed to put Lund in the team’s car for the Daytona 500 and brother Leonard Wood (Class of 2013), the team’s crew chief, came up with a novel strategy: Lund would run the entire race on a single set of tires, and he would make one fewer pit stop than his competitors.

The plan worked to perfection – but just barely.

In the final 10 laps, race leaders Fred Lorenzen (Class of 2015) and Ned Jarrett (Class of 2011) each had to make stops for a splash of fuel, while Lund stayed out. On the final lap, Lund ran out of fuel in Turn 4, but had a large enough lead that he coasted to victory about half a lap ahead of Lorenzen on the 2.5-mile, high-banked Daytona International Speedway track.

Lund’s triumph marked the first of five Daytona 500 victories for Wood Brothers Racing.

The 1963 season was memorable for the Wood Brothers for another reason: Using drivers Tiny Lund, Marvin Panch, Glen Wood and Dave MacDonald, the team amassed enough points to win the Cup Series Owner’s Championship for the only time in its history. A third brother, Ray Lee Wood, was listed by the team as the owner of record in 1963, so his name is on the championship trophy.

It’s worth noting also that in the Daytona 500, it was Ray Lee and a Firestone representative who checked the tires during every pit stop and gave the team the ok to use just one set for the entire race.

In Heritage Speedway on the top floor of the NASCAR Hall of Fame, both Lund’s 1963 Daytona 500 race trophy and Ray Lee Wood’s 1963 Owner’s Championship trophy are on display in the same case.

When you visit the NASCAR Hall of Fame, you can see these two trophies, along with Glen Wood’s 1954 Ford Sportsman that he raced on the beach at Daytona in 1958 (NASCAR 75: Moments and Memories) and a Wood Brothers 1961 Ford Galaxie Sunliner Convertible driven by Curtis Turner (class of 2016) at Darlington Raceway (Glory Road: 75 Years).