RIDGEWAY, VA :: Hayden Woods was one of the surprise stories to come out of the 2013 Martinsville DuPont Credit Union (MDCU) 300. Woods scored an eighth place finish in last year’s race. Now, he’s hoping to prove that his eighth place finish was no fluke.
Woods started out the season teaming up with Robert Pressley and raced at Hickory Motor Speedway. The season has had its ups and downs. Now, he’s reunited with his old crew-chief, David Roope.
“The season’s been up and down,” Woods said. “We’ve been struggling. We were with Robert Pressley earlier this year and then took a break there halfway through the year. We started back up at the end of the year in the last race and ran pretty good for what all happened. We had some struggles.”
Reunited with Roope, Woods feels the car should be as good as it was last year, if not better, as he looks ahead to Martinsville and Myrtle Beach.
“Now we’re at Martinsville and plan on running this race, Myrtle Beach and the Fall Brawl at Hickory,” Woods stated. “I’m excited about Martinsville because the car was really handling good getting up out. We got some pretty good hopes from the 87 camp.”
Woods hopes he can back up last year’s performance or even improve on it. However, he knows the challenges of racing at Martinsville and knows it will be a challenge.
“I would love to do the same thing as last year,” Woods explained. “I hope we can get in on time but I think we’re all going to have to do the heat race, well most of us will. Heat racing will be good. In the feature, we’ll just ride around in 20th, 25th place. That was our plan last year. Just ride around and bring what comes to us. In the last 10 laps, we moved from 20th to eighth place and even up pat eight and got shuffled back on that last restart. Just ride around, let everything unfold for the last 10 laps or so. The craziness is happening everywhere so it’s basically just survival.”
Woods was also excited about having Wheel Chill on board. Wheel Chill is an innovative new hub cooling system that many teams are using for this weekend’s MDCU 300.
Hayden Woods has something to prove. He wants to prove last year’s performance was no fluke. That may be a challenge, but it’s a challenge he has accepted.
