BY his own admission, Dale Wood was more than a little reckless in how he went about racing up the Supercars ladder as a youngster.
“When I was young and all that, I had some awesome races and some awesome results but it came at a huge cost of me tearing up my car and a lot of other people’s cars,” Wood said in a frank admission on this week’s V8 Sleuth Podcast.
The popular larrikin, who has gone on to chalk up 167 Supercars Championship race starts to date, recounted one particular time he upset someone during his 2008 Super2 campaign.
It just so happened to be that someone was none other than championship-winning team owner Ross Stone, a future Supercars Hall of Famer.
Wood was representing Greg Murphy Racing and had just finished a race in which he’d been involved in a vigorous battle with Stone Brothers Racing’s Jonathon Webb.
“I was getting a reputation that I didn’t need to have and you don’t want: ‘he’s really fast but he just tears shit up’,” Wood told host Aaron Noonan.
“I remember one of the races at Winton and this would be a classic of me, do something stupid, put myself down the back and just do these mega drives from the back.
“And that’s what happened in a race at Winton… the Safety Car landed about halfway through and then I was onto the back of Jonathon Webb and I did an absolute number on the back of his car, on the front of my car, and I had already torn up however many cars on my way through as well.
“I think I might have bumped him and tapped him a few times while still under Safety Car.
“I ended up passing him and pressed on forward.
“When I came into pitlane I had a fella come over and abuse me and calling me all sorts and I actually – I should tone it down a little bit – but essentially I called this bloke a fat prick and told him to f*** off.
“Then I got reminded by, I think it was Dean Lillie at the time who was engineering me, he said ‘that was Ross Stone you just called a fat prick’ – and I said worse than that.”
As he continued, Wood conceded: “I didn’t know what he (Stone) looked like.
“I was wrapped up in my own world in a big way of ‘this is what I want to do and this is how I’m going about it. I’m fast as hell and I’m going to, not intentionally smash shit up, but I just hadn’t found my groove’. The speed was there but I was smashing a lot of shit up.
“Then, I don’t know how this came about, it might have been Kev (Murphy) that gave me Ross’ number and I had to ring him either on the Monday or the Tuesday after that event and finally got onto him.
“He would have been like ‘who the hell is this’ and I’m sure he did not want to receive a phone call off me; told him how sorry I was and how disrespectful and all that sort of thing.
“Since then I have had a bloody good relationship with him.
“I never raced with him, had talks about possibly driving for him and different things that have always been possibles but nothing has ever come of it.
“But in terms of relationship and being able to sit and have a chat with him and pick up the phone, we have had a really good thing ever since so it was either a good thing I did or a bad thing, but it wasn’t my proudest moment.”
Wood made his Supercars Championship debut later that year for Tasman Motorsport at the Phillip Island 500.
After a shortlived stint at Kelly Racing in early 2009, Wood rebuilt his career by winning the Super2 title four years later, turning that into a four-year full-time tenure in the main game.
Wood is expected to partner Brad Jones Racing’s Andre Heimgartner at this year’s Sandown 500 and Bathurst 1000.
