Leonard Wood reflects on 1965 Indy 500 victory with Jim Clark

STUART, Virginia -- There are only a few routes to get to this picturesque community tucked away in the mountains and valleys of Southern Virginia. It's a trip into history -- of bygone times when life was simple and devoid of today's complications. In fact, it's difficult to get a strong cell signal because of the hills and mountains that surround this Virginia community that was named after Confederate General Jeb Stuart.

This community also has a strong link to the Indianapolis 500. It was 50 years ago that a NASCAR pit crew came to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to service Colin Chapman's famed Lotus Powered-by-Ford driven by the most glamorous Formula One driver of the day -- Scotland's Jim Clark.

After Clark scored a convincing win in the 49th Indianapolis 500 on May 30, 1965, the Wood Brothers Racing Team experienced the thrill of victory at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. That was 29 years before Jeff Gordon won the Inaugural Brickyard 400 in 1994 -- the first NASCAR race ever helped at the "World's Most Famous Race Course."

"In a way it seems like it was 50 years ago and in a way it don't," 80-year-old Leonard Wood told FOXSports.com in an exclusive interview at Wood Brothers Racing Museum. "They restored the Lotus five years ago and took it to England in the Goodwood Festival. It was like that car was shoved in the corner and forgotten and then when we went to England the car was restored and it was like being back in the Winner's Circle.

"It was so rewarding. It was like living it all over again. Some of the Lotus crew was there and that was very rewarding."

Four Wood brothers -- Glen, Leonard, Delano and Ray Lee -- along with fellow crew members Kenny Martin and Jim Reed were responsible for the pit stops that day for not only the race-winning car driven by Clark, but also Lotus teammate Bobby Johns. Chapman and Clark had been serious contenders to win at Indianapolis in 1963 and 1964 but lost both years. They determined one way to get an advantage in 1965 was with superior pit stops and that is when John Cowley of the Ford Motor Company contacted Glen Wood to bring the famed Wood Brothers of Stuart, Virginia to Indianapolis.

It was Cowley, the Ford Motor Company engineer and chassis designer, who approached Leonard's older brother Glen about going to the Indianapolis 500 to serve as the pit crew for the Lotus. At that time, the Wood Brothers Racing team was one of the prime factory-backed teams in NASCAR's top division. Tiny Lund had driven the Wood Brothers Ford to victory in the 1963 Daytona 500.

The Wood Brothers were famous for bringing speed to pit road as the best NASCAR pit crew of the day. Pit stops at the Indianapolis 500, though, often took 50 seconds or more. Ford had the idea that a fast race car along with a fast pit crew would get Clark to victory.

But how would the Lotus crew react to stepping aside and turning their creation over to a NASCAR team? Remember, at that time NASCAR was a very regional sport and the Indianapolis 500 was unquestionably the biggest race on the planet.

"We didn't know how they would react," Wood said. "Sometimes in a situation like that people resent you being there. They didn't show any sign of resentment and were glad we were there. They turned us loose on the stop. But five years ago, one of the crew members that was there said when we came into Gasoline Alley and into the garage and started talking, they hoped we could pit faster than we could talk.

"We really hit a home run with that."

At that time, IndyCar pit stops had an over-center jack stand on roller-skate wheels on the back of it. When a pit crewmember pulled down on it, the car would lift up. NASCAR has always used the manual jacks to get a car off the ground.

"It as a very quick way to jack it up being as light as they were," Wood recalled. "The hoses --€“ one was shorter and one was longer -- but we had to figure out exactly where to stop the car and the position of the tank so if he stopped too short it wouldn't reach and if he overshot the pit it would buckle the hoses.

"Jim Clark said, 'You just tell me where to stop.' Boy, did he pit it on the money."

The Wood Brothers also rethreaded the knockoff lock nut on the wheels so they would spin off quicker. The key was to hit it once with the hammer and it would spin completely off. They used graphite to polish the threads and create as less friction as possible.

"The big thing was the four dial pins in the hub that the wheel lines up on," Wood said. "When we got up there they were so tight you couldn't get the wheel off. So we re-honed those so they would be snug but still come off quickly."

Prior to the 1965 Indianapolis 500, the Wood Brothers had competed at the biggest NASCAR speedways of the day --€“ Daytona, Charlotte, Darlington and Atlanta. Arriving at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, however, was "hallowed ground."

"We had always listened to the Indianapolis 500 on the radio," Wood said. "It's always been a special place in our hearts -- the Indianapolis 500. Ford Motor Company took us up there in 1964 and we all sat in the third turn grandstand. That wasn't a good day because Dave MacDonald had driven for us at Riverside, California and he was killed in the Indy 500 that year."

The trip to Indy one year later was when innovation came to pit road by the Wood Brothers.

"In 1965, we spent the whole week up there preparing the car and listened to them tune the motors," Wood said.

"They pulled the race cars through Gasoline Alley with lawnmowers. We went through inspections and the inspector wanted to know why we had the outlet on the gas tank up so high. We had a very giant, venturi inside and we had to have the same distance full circle so that put the center of it way off the floor. All the others had it on the bottom. The inspector wanted to know why it was so high and I told him it was just up there.

"He said, 'I bet you $1,000 you can't pour 20 gallons a minute out of that tank.' That's not very much. We didn't bet with him but when we got through we checked the flow and we put 58 gallons in 15 seconds. We knew we were going to be under 20 seconds. We practiced connecting and disconnecting and doing it all at once so if anybody was watching they didn't know what was going on."

The team never changed tires during the race but measured the tread depth on every pit stop. Lund also won the 1963 Daytona 500 on just one set of tires.

"We had two pit stops and my brother, Ray, had a gauge to measure the tread depth," Wood said. "We had treaded tires back then and when they wore down they were actually faster. We had a third of the tread left when the race was over."

There were just two pit stops in the 1965 Indy 500 for the Wood Brothers to show their "Pit Road Ballet." Back then, the cars carried an enormous 58 gallons of fuel. Today's IndyCars carry much less fuel and the 99th Indianapolis 500 will have nine or more pit stops.

"When we were fueling the car, I was leaning against the car and you could feel it swell up," Wood said. "You could tell the way that Lotus was designed it was a fast car."

Chapman, his crew and Clark all treated the Wood Brothers with tremendous respect. The plan was if everything went normal in the race, the Wood Brothers would make two pit stops. But if something out of the ordinary happened, he had the Lotus crew on standby.

The race went flawlessly except for the wardrobe.

"Back then, we didn't' have time to get uniforms so they told us to wear the Cup uniforms --€“ the Wood Brothers 21 Ford," Wood recalled. "Remember, we pitted NASCAR driver Bobby Johns as well in the second team car and he finished seventh. We pitted both cars but the leader had preference. He had the stop first. We had several NASCAR drivers go up there in that era and give it a try."

A.J. Foyt was the defending winner of the Indianapolis 500 at that time and had won several NASCAR races for the Wood Brothers.

"We were very good friends and when we walked in, he invites us in to his garage - how he has his car and how he has it fixed," Wood said. "Then A.J. asked, 'By the way, what are you guys doing up here?' When we told him, you can imagine what he called us."

The legendary Clark was a calm, easy-going driver and a great person to work with according to Wood. Clark was an icon of the day.

"Dan Gurney praised Jim Clark something unreal," Wood said. "I asked Dan, 'Is Clark better than you? I can't believe anybody is better than Dan Gurney' Dan said, 'If you make a lap and make every turn and go in the turn as hard as you can go and brake as hard as you can and barely get the car slowed down for every turn if you don't do that every lap he will beat you.'

"After we got acquainted with the road racers Jim Clark was 'The Man' in Formula One."

Getting Clark into victory lane at Indianapolis that year was the top priority for the Ford Motor Company. That is why the Wood Brothers were called into action including Glen, Leonard, Ray Lee, Kenneth Martin, Ralph Edwards and Jim Reid.

"To win the Indianapolis 500 was huge," Leonard recalled. "It didn't get any bigger than that. Big Bill France (NASCAR founder and president) was sitting up there in the stands and said, 'That's my boys.'"

The Wood Brothers also made believers out of the skeptical IndyCar crowd, including 1957 winner Sam Hanks, who was working as a broadcaster that day.

"Sam Hanks, a former winner, was commentating and when we made the first stop in 17 or 18 seconds he said, 'You can bet they didn't get it full. A green crew and all that. They will be back in --€“ you can count on that.' We kept running and he said, 'I don't understand it. It must be a fuel mixture.' So they sent a runner down there to see what kind of fuel we were running. The year before was pressurized fuel system. This was the first year it was gravity flow and they thought we would be in the pits for a full minute.

"We caught them all by surprise.

"We got the most publicity we ever got in our life. We had newspaper clippings coming from Ford that could make a catalog. We hit a home run that day."

Glen's son, Eddie, didn't make the trip to Indianapolis because he had school that day back in Stuart, Virginia. But he proved to be just as innovative as his father and uncles by sneaking a transistor radio into his sixth grade classroom.

"Remember this was 1965 so it wasn't like an iPod; it was about the size of a pack of cigarettes," Eddie Wood said of the radio. "I took that little thing you stick in your ear and ran that up my sleeve with the radio in my pocket. I wore a long-sleeve shirt and it was almost summertime so it was hot. I remember everybody asking, `Why are you wearing a long-sleeve shirt?' I was listening to the race during class.

"Fortunately, I didn't get busted for it."

By the time the race ended, young Eddie was on the school bus for the ride home and didn't have to hide the radio any longer.

"I remember how cool it was they were part of that," Eddie recalled of the Woods. "They kept talking on the radio broadcast about the pit stops. It was the first time a green car had won, a rear-engine had won and a Ford had won. I remember the announcers saying their total time on pit road was quicker than the next best time of one stop. They were done for the day in 18 seconds when people were spending 45 seconds for one stop. There are so many firsts that happened that day. The way the pit stops and fueling was done that day set the standards for the next 50 years as did the rear-engine part of it."

Today, Glen is 89 years old and Leonard 80. While they remain part of the original Wood Brothers, the next generation of 63-year-old Eddie and his brother, Len, are in charge of the team.

But the Wood Brothers know what it takes to win big races, as 20-year-old Trevor Bayne became the youngest Daytona 500 winner in history in 2011. Bayne joined David Pearson in 1976 and Tiny Lund in 1963 as drivers that won the Daytona 500 for the Wood Brothers.

In 1965, Wood never believed that NASCAR would ever compete at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Ironically, the Wood Brothers pitted in the same pit stall that Clark was assigned in 1965 for the inaugural Brickyard 400 in 1994.

Leonard Wood will be at this year's 99th Indianapolis 500 to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Clark's 1965 Indy 500 win. He arrives at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Thursday and will be honored throughout the weekend in a variety of activities.

"The Indy 500 is still the Indy 500," Wood said. "There are so many celebrities there. The pre-race is one of the big highlights of the event. And the history there is unmatched by any other race."

Leonard Wood should know because 50 years ago, he was part of a very special chapter in the history of the Indianapolis 500.

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