Wood Brothers, Berry ready for first Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Wood Brothers Racing and Josh Berry are meeting each other at the unique corner of 75th and Second in the 2025 season.

This weekend at the Cook Out Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium, Wood Brothers Racing will unofficially kick off its 75th season in the NASCAR Cup Series with Josh Berry, who is kicking off his second season in the Cup Series.

While racing as a rookie for Stewart-Haas Racing in what became a lame duck season for the organization, Berry earned two top-5 finishes and four top-10 finishes with 96 laps led during the 2024 season. He finished 27th in points, falling to Carson Hocevar in the rookie of the year battle.

Berry showed glimpses of speed, starting well and leading double-digit laps at Bristol in March and Iowa in June. The latter race was part of a six-race summer stretch that saw Berry climb to 19th in points and playoff contention.

To cap it off, Wood Brothers Racing named Berry as the driver of the No. 21 Ford for 2025.

Now in 2025, after the second half of 2024, didn’t match how good the summer was, Berry has landed on his feet.

“Last year was a challenge from start to finish with everything going on,” Berry said, “but I’m proud that I did a good enough job to find myself in this opportunity and to go race for the Wood Brothers with the history they’ve had and the tradition, and obviously the alliance with Team Penske. I feel like this is a great opportunity for me.”

Berry will race the No. 21 Ford for a new generation of the Wood Brothers. While Berry stepped up to succeed Kevin Harvick in his old ride last season, Jon Wood stepped up to succeed his father, Eddie Wood, in the role of team president.

“I think for years and years and years I always felt like I could do it better,” Jon Wood said. “I don’t think that there’s really anything, in fact I know, there’s not anything that I’ve done that has changed anything in a meaningful way.”

Wood and Berry are new cuts from a familiar fabric of racing. Berry said that was evident a couple of weeks ago when he visited the Wood Brothers Racing Museum in Stuart, Virginia.

“I’ll be honest, I need to go spend another eight to 10 hours because there was so much,” Berry said. “There are race cars and pictures and uniforms and trophies. It’s hard to take everything in, in that short period of time, because you hear one story and you’re focused on one car or picture. And then your eye catches Leonard building a half-scale carburetor. There are all these projects going on there, but it’s really cool.”

For such an old-school racing duo, there is no place better than Bowman Gray Stadium for them to kick things off.

In the early-1960s, Wood Brothers Racing earned five NASCAR Cup Series wins in a 13-race stretch at Bowman Gray Stadium.

Glen Wood swept the three Cup races at Bowman Gray in 1960, then returned to victory lane as a driver in July 1963 and as an owner with Marvin Panch in March 1964 – defeating stout greats like Rex White and Petty Enterprises who took turns dominating the quarter-mile track.

Outside of the Cup Series, the Woods racked up their fair share of wins and memories at the stadium.

Looking on were Glen’s sons, Len and Eddie Wood.

“I was about five years old or six years old when daddy was winning there,” said Len Wood, the team’s chief operating officer. “And I remember where we used to sit in the grandstand was the backstretch near that little spotter stand, a little bit towards turn three down about four rows.”

“I would have been eight years old when my dad raced there. In 1960, he won a championship there in that ‘37 flatback coach, which we referred to as the backseater,” Eddie Wood said.

This weekend, Josh Berry will sport a scheme akin to that flatback coach, in honor of the track’s history that predates NASCAR itself.

Part of that history are some historic superstitions that families, like the Woods, swear are the difference between winning and crashing out.

The number 13, $50 bills, the color green and…

“I wouldn’t eat a peanut now at a race track. They were bad luck,” Eddie Wood said. “The only answer I’ve ever really heard from anybody, my dad or Leonard, would have been that somebody crashed somewhere, not Bowman Gray, and the car was turned over and in the roof there was peanut shells. Somebody had been eating peanuts with the shell in the car and from that day on it was considered bad luck.”

The Woods aren’t the only family who swear by that.

“You could ask Chocolate or Burt [Myers] or any of those guys that raced and their family raced there when you were kids. It was just a no-no,” Eddie added.

Peanuts or not, Bowman Gray Stadium is dubbed the Madhouse. A simple search of “Bowman Gray fight” on YouTube shows why — but why does this track bring that out?

“I also said that it also brings out the best. Everybody I think is gonna try their hardest and if that doesn’t really work out, then maybe the worst is gonna come out. What I mean is how competitive everybody will be,” Eddie Wood said.

While the Woods have a strong short-track racer as a silver bullet in their chamber, Josh Berry has never raced at Bowman Gray Stadium before. But, Berry has raced in a similar scenario as what The Clash will be, where 39 teams will go for 23 spots in the main event.

“I feel like this is gonna remind me a lot of the Valleystar 300 at Martinsville. There were a lot of those races where we would go and there would be eighty-some-odd cars and heat races and that’s one of the toughest short track races to win,” Berry said.

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