Sure, you remember the historic 1979 Daytona snowstorm...but what about the Great Blizzard of Atlanta in 1993?

 Legendary David Pearson (L), with his long-time crew chief Leonard Wood (C), and one of Ford's newest stars, Carl Edwards (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
 

  By Mike Mulhern
  mikemulhern.net

  

   Everyone remembers 1979.
   Hey, but remember 1993, and the Great Blizzard of Atlanta?
   Sure, you do. But who won the race?
   Hint: he was driving for the Woods.
    The Wood brothers, two generations now, have had a ragged run of it lately on the tour. It's been a while since they had top contenders.
    But last fall's run with newcomer Trevor Bayne may have been a turning point. Now the Woods, who ran a limited schedule last season, are looking toward a much more aggressive 2011, and Edsel Ford II has been taking a personal interest in this comeback.
    After all, the team, for so many years running out of Stuart, Va., does have an illustrious history, first with Glen himself, and Leonard as star crew chief and engine man, with legends like David Pearson, Cale Yarborough, Neil Bonnett, Marvin Panch, A. J. Foyt, Dan Gurney, Donnie Allison, Curtis Turner, Tiny Lund, Buddy Baker and Dale Jarrett.
    Edsel Ford – who likes to talk about Ford being "the only car maker in the world that can say it has won the Daytona 500, the Indianapolis 500, the Monaco Grand Prix, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the Baja 1,000 and the Bathhurst 1,000 in Australia" -- as been giving his teams a pep talk the past few weeks, looking at getting his family's company the first NASCAR championship since Kurt Busch pulled it off for Jack Roush in 2004.
    And after that slow start to 2010, these Ford teams certainly hope to get off to a quicker start this season.
    How the Woods fit into the big picture isn't clear yet. But Ford points out their legacy – this will be the Woods' 61st consecutive season in NASCAR, and 61st consecutive season running nothing but Fords and Mercurys.
   
   

    Trevor Bayne: The Woods' newest driver (Photo: Autostock)
   

    But back to the Atlanta Blizzard 500:
   After wacky 1992, and Alan Kulwicki's improbable come-from-behind charge to the Winston Cup championship, 1993 opened wild too – Jeff Gordon, then virtually unknown, and just a rookie, led the first lap of the season-opener, after winning his Daytona qualifier…Rusty Wallace survived a frightening crash….and down the stretch it looked like Dale Earnhardt would finally win the sport's biggest race.
   Ah, but Jarrett upset Earnhardt at the finish line.  
   The tour moved on to Richmond and Rockingham and then Atlanta, where a late March blizzard pounded the South.
   Len Wood remembers well: "All of us got stuck down there. We all stayed in our hotels for another two days before we could get home."
   A week later the teams returned. Wallace, Earnhardt, Mark Martin battled it out….but at the end it was the Wood brothers with Morgan Shepherd – ageless Morgan Shepherd, the Hickory, N.C., legend who got a late career start on the Cup tour but who has kept at this thing and who is expected to be at Daytona next week trying to make the Nationwide field, at 69.
  

  

  
Morgan Shepherd (Photo: Autostock)
  

   Morgan Shepherd is one of those characters who used to fill the NASCAR garage, before the sport turned so vanilla.
    "All they talked about was how fast Mark was," Shepherd says now. "But we really had the fastest car after about halfway, though it was like nobody knew we were that fast because I was coming from so far back.
    "When Mark blew up, I was running second."
    And closing.
    But then a flat tire late…and an unscheduled pit stop.
   "After I took off, Eddie (Wood) said 'Morgan, if there's any way you can save gas, we need to stretch it eight laps'," Shepherd says.
   "Our car was so fast I drafted other cars and really didn't use much throttle. We went 110 miles…drove it into the winner's circle, and still didn't run out of gas.
     "I don't know that anybody had ever gone 110 miles at Atlanta before, but we did."
    Ironically, Kulwicki offered the Woods some key advice. He'd crashed out and was in the Woods' pits. "He started talking to us about when we were planning on stopping," Len Wood recalled. "We told we were planning on not stopping. And he said 'Well, you can't make it.'"
    And Kulwicki, remember, had just played the Atlanta gas mileage game to perfect a few months earlier, in winning the championship.
    "A little later he came running over, in almost a panic," Wood recalled, "and said 'Hey, you can make it -- you need to start backing him off right now.'
    "So we started backing Morgan off, and we ended up making it on fuel."
     Shepherd was 51 that day, one of the oldest men in NASCAR ever to win a Cup event.
     Two weeks later Kulwicki was tragically killed in a plane crash flying to Bristol.

    

      Glen Wood (L), the man who started the family empire, and Edsel Ford II, renewing his own family's support of the famous Wood brothers (Photo: Autostock)