Wood Brothers Looking Forward to Michigan

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The Wood Brothers, Bill Elliott and the #21 Motorcraft Ford Fusion will be heading to Brooklyn, Michigan this weekend, the home track of the team’s primary sponsors Motorcraft and Ford Motor Company.

Michigan International Speedway (MIS) is a two-mile D-shaped oval with 18° banking in the turns, 12° banking on the frontstretch and 5° banking on the backstretch. NASCAR’s inaugural race at MIS in June of 1969 was won by Cale Yarborough in the Wood Brothers #21 Mercury.

The Wood Brothers have started each of the 78 NASCAR Sprint Cup races held at MIS earning 11 wins, 26 top fives, 37 top tens and 9 poles. Like the Wood Brothers, Bill Elliott has also accumulated impressive statistics at MIS. He has 57 starts with 7 wins, 17 top fives, 29 top ten finishes and 7 poles. Combined, Bill and the Wood Brothers have won almost one-quarter of the NASCAR Sprint Cup races held at MIS.

The teams will take to the track on Friday, June 12, 2009, with the first practice scheduled to begin at 11:30 am and qualifying to follow at 3:10 pm. You can watch practice and qualifying on the Speed Channel.

I hope they have a great weekend.

Good luck

Good luck to Bill and the #21 Wood Bros. team this week!

They had a great top-15 qualifying effort.

great!!

Good luck Bill Bring it on in.

Bill brought it home 16th! WTG!

Great!!!

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BROOKLYN, Mich., June 14, 2009—For Bill Elliott and the Wood Brothers, the LifeLock 400 at Michigan International Speedway over the weekend was another 400 miles in the right direction.

Elliott ran in or around the top 20 for the entire afternoon and then stretched 46 laps out of the last tank of fuel en route to a 16th-place finish on Sunday.

“The guys did a great job,” co-owner Eddie Wood said. “We had a great run and learned a lot.”

The 16th-place showing on Sunday follows the team’s best finish of the season, 15th at Charlotte three races ago. On Friday, Elliott qualified in the 15th position, making his No. 21 Motorcraft Fusion the top-qualifying Ford in the Michigan field.

“My hat’s off to these guys,” Elliott said. “They have done an awesome job. We just need to keep expanding on what we’re doing, but this Ford Motorcraft bunch has done a great job.”

In a race that produced only three caution flags, Elliott’s Ford, at times was running lap times as fast as those of the leaders. Following the race’s final caution period when the entire field pitted, a handful of the leaders eventually ran out of fuel, while Elliott maintained power to the end. Elliott made up four positions on the final run.

The Wood Brothers are running a limited 12-race schedule in 2009 as the team looks to regain the form it had when it was dominating the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series in the 1970’s.

Elliott, the 1988 series champion, is in his third season with the team, which will miss the next three races before returning to action on July 10-11 at Chicagoland Speedway, which – like Lowe’s Motor Speedway in Charlotte, where Elliott scored his best finish of the season – is a 1½-mile track.

“Motorcraft and Ford Racing has helped us out on this deal for this year and believing in us to run a limited amount of races and it’s really paying off,” Elliott said. “I think [crew chief] David Hyder and all the guys working back at the shop have really improved this car 100 percent. From where we started the first of the year to the last two or three races, I think we’ve learned a lot.”

They did a great job!