The Wood Brothers and the Darlington Raceway just go well together. It’s like peanut butter and jelly. When you think of the Southern 500, it’s hard not to think of the famed No. 21 circling around the 1.366-mile South Carolina race track.

The Wood Brothers have won the annual Labor Day weekend race four times. Now, in a rare doubleheader for the NASCAR Cup Series on the same track this May, the No. 21 Ford was found up front again.

Matt DiBenedetto finished 14th on Sunday in the first race back since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the sport for 70 days, and nabbed a top 10 three days later in Wednesday night’s Toyota 500.

For DiBenedetto, he wasn’t too happy with his finish though. He said an early race mistake took away their track position and that in turn hurt the handling of his race car.

“We started off the night okay,” DiBenedetto said. “I thought we made some improvements on the car and had a little track position and moved forward. We pitted under the first caution and thought we might have had an issue. We did not. So that stuck us back in the field. From then on, not having track position with this high downforce racing is a real pain in the butt. We struggled to get it the rest of the day.

“As the track rubbered up we fought the same issue we did on Sunday of losing rear grip in the car. We were fading at the end and then (crew chief) Greg Erwin just made a good bold call at the end seeing some weather coming and my spotter Doug Campbell as well was in on that. We got lucky and pulled a ninth place out of it. All of the tracks except for Darlington we have had really good speed at so I know we will take a little luck from this one and moving forward we should be fast at a lot of places and be better at Charlotte.”

DiBenedetto is right too. He sits ninth in the points standings as he’s been really solid through the first six races. Over the last five events, he was second, 13th, 13th, 14th and ninth respectively. That’s great progress for him as a driver and for the team to be running in the top 15 again.