50 Years Ago, David Pearson Started an Incredible NASCAR Journey with Wood Brothers

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It was the start of something big. Very big.

Fifty years ago, David Pearson buckled into the Wood Brothers No. 21 Mercury at Darlington Raceway for the first time. The Woods had chosen Pearson to replace A.J. Foyt, who had decided to concentrate on his IndyCar program.

Pearson was 37 years old and had won only three races over the previous two seasons. He had won the Cup championship in 1966, 1968 and 1969 and had won 11 races in 1969, but some pundits predicted that his best years were over.

They were wrong, and in a very big way.

Pearson was the star of the show—of the entire weekend, in fact—in that first race at Darlington April 16, 1972. He babied the car in practice—a typical Pearson ploy, but then won the pole with a speed of 148.209 mph. He led 202 of the race’s 293 laps, including the final 93, and was the only driver on the lead lap at the finish. Richard Petty was a lap down in second place.

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Pearson and the Woods, running a partial Cup schedule, won six races that year, but that was simply a prelude to 1973, when the No. 21 finished first in 11 of 18 races, dominating the circuit’s big tracks.

The pairing became one of the greatest in the history of the sport. The great mystery was why they hadn’t gotten together earlier.

“We hit it right off the first race,” crew chief Leonard Wood said of Pearson. “His style just fit ours. He just knew how to enter a corner and exit a corner. You can teach drivers how to do things and make good drivers out of them. Guys can be taught. But the guys who have a little edge on you are the ones who were born with something the others don’t have. He had that.”

Pearson and Wood worked well together, and Wood said part of that magic was knowing when to talk and when to shut up.

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“I knew what he wanted in the car,” Wood said. “He knew what line was the best for his setup. You’d insult him if you started to tell him which line to take.”

Wood recalled a race on the Riverside, Calif., road course as a prime example of Pearson’s style and determination. That day he caught and outran Cale Yarborough, another superstar of the period, as the Woods team tangled with that of Junior Johnson.

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“Cale had a 44-second lead on us with 100 miles to go,” Wood said. “We came in the pits and changed two tires. Cale changed four. We came out 19 seconds behind him. I told him to see if he could gain on Cale. He said, ‘Just check this out.’

“I knew Junior was going to tell Cale he better get going, that David was coming. David got up to within seven seconds, and Cale spun off the course and David won the race.

“Sometimes they thought they had him beat and he was just watching and taking care of the equipment. When it came time to go, they didn’t know what hit them.”

Ironically, the great run of success enjoyed by the Pearson-Woods combo ended where it began – Darlington Raceway.

In the April 1979 race at the track, one Pearson mastered over the years with 10 victories, miscommunication in the pits resulted in a major embarrassment for the team. When Wood yelled, “Whoa!,” over the team radio, Pearson thought he said, “Go!,” and gunned the car. Lug nuts had not been tightened on two wheels, and they fell off, leaving the car a helpless hunk at the end of pit road.

It was a very unusual incident for one of racing’s best drivers and his generally stellar pit crew. A few days later, Pearson and the Woods parted ways, a decision both came to regret.

“We had never had a significant disagreement,” Wood said. “After that deal in Darlington, David and I were talking and figuring out what we were going to run in Martinsville (the next race). We were going to forget it and go on. We really thought he was ready to retire.”

Neil Bonnett replaced Pearson for the Martinsville race. Pearson raced on for several team owners and won again in the Southern 500 at Darlington later that season.