In 1976, he hired on driver Jimmy Boyd to pilot his sprinter. “He had another car in his shop — a supermodified — and the guy that owned the supermodified asked me to drive it at Clovis,” Boyd remembers. “And I drove for him, and then right after that Kenny asked me to drive his sprint car.
“I‘d just come back from Pennsylvania and he was helping another guy. Actually, what happened was Garry Rush from Australia was driving for him, and I guess he wasn‘t happy with Garry or something, but he asked me to drive for him and I started driving for him.”
Boyd reflects on their three years together as a learning experience for both he and Woodruff. “You know, it‘s kind of funny because Kenny didn‘t know a lot when I went to work for him. He was a real thorough mechanic. I mean, real thorough! But he didn‘t know a lot about setups and all that kind of stuff. And, we learned a lot together. Cause I‘d been racing in Pennsylvania; I‘d been racing a lot more than he had. Like, he would maybe race once a week or something. So, I knew a little bit more at that time than him, but then we learned a lot together, and then he became a really, really good mechanic after a while.
“The tracks out here in California are more tacky. They‘re real sticky. And then we‘d go back east and race on those real dry, slick tracks and we‘d have a lot of trouble. Part of it was me, and part of it was knowing we didn‘t know how to set up the car for that. And we asked people and we learned a lot that way about car setups, and torsion bars, and stuff like that.”
In 1978, Boyd and Woodruff towed from California to Lanny Edwards‘ Devil‘s Bowl Speedway in Mesquite, Texas for a three-day event and together won the first finale points race for Ted Johnson‘s fledgling experiment called the World of Outlaws. “It was just a regular race,” Boyd recalls. “It‘s kind of a big deal now, but it wasn‘t then, because we all used to travel around like that.
“We weren‘t racing. There were no races around here earlier in the year, and he had his car ready to go. And, he asked me if I wanted to go back there, and I said, ‘Sure.‘ We raced at a place called West Capital, and it was a real heavy, real sticky track. And when we went to Devil‘s Bowl it was similar to that. Devil‘s Bowl is a little bigger, but it was similar. So, we knew what to do at that kind of track. We did change bars for the main event, cause we could see it was gonna get a little dry so we put a little softer bars in but, other than that, we were pretty much used to that.
“You know what was really neat about it, though, is anybody that was anything in sprint car racing at that time was there. You know, like Rick Ferkel and Bobby Allen, and Wolfgang, and all those guys were there. Jan Opperman was there. There‘s a lot of guys that I could name. So, that made it really special.”
Woodruff spent 1979 and ‘80 on the WoO trail, earning eight feature wins with drivers Johnny Anderson and Tim Green. In ‘81, Danny Smith signed on as his driver. “He was pretty quiet, and a really dry sense of humor, which, everybody thought he was grumpy. And, at times he was,” Smith recalls. “And, I didn‘t know him. I mean, I knew of him, but not much. Then C.K. Spurlock hired him to work on the Gambler car in ‘81 and we did two seasons. And he showed up, and he was quiet. He was a little intimidating, you know? I‘d heard about him. And, of course, you hear all the worst. And, you know, he was very demanding. I mean, you could run 49-and-a-half good laps and miss it on one of the laps and he‘d let you know about it.”
“My father was tough on me too,” Donny Schatz shares. “So, when I raced with Kenny Woodruff, it was both Kenny and my father. It wasn‘t anything new to me. It‘s something that I think drivers have to deal with. In today‘s age, we have drivers…their dads tell them — even when they do something stupid or they do something wrong — that it‘s OK, they did it right. Because they don‘t want to hurt their feelings and they wanna pump them up instead of knock them down. And, you know, Kenny had no problem knocking you down.”
Dave Blaney ran with Woodruff for five years (from 1993 through 1997) before leaving sprint cars to compete in NASCAR. They ran Beverly and Casey Lunas No. 10 Ford, before Blaney partnered with Keith Hylton to form his own team. Among their accomplishments together, they won the 1995 World of Outlaws championship, the Kings Royal in 1993 and ‘95, the 1997 Knoxville Nationals, the 1997 Historical Big One, and the 1997 Gold Cup at Chico, California.
Following his departure as driver, he continued to field his World of Outlaws team with Kenny turning wrenches. With brother Dale behind the wheel, the duo clinched the 1998 Historical Big One. The next season, with the late Kevin Gobrecht behind the wheel, the team would claim the 1999 Historical Big One (the third consecutive event win for Woodruff and the Blaney team), then earn a podium finish in the Knoxville Nationals before Gobrecht tragically lost his life in the ride at I-80 Speedway later the same year.
“A couple times, I remember he was mad at me,” Dave recalls. “We won the Kings Royal. No sh*t, won the Kings Royal,” he says with a laugh, “but got a little lucky doing it. I mean, I was racing Jac Haudenschild on the last lap for the win. And, I forget in my head how the whole race went down, if I was leading and Jac got to me, I don‘t know. But we ended up racing into three, coming to the checkered side-by-side. His car actually breaks something in the engine and I win the race. And I kinda think he had me beat, where he was on the track and where I was, but, still! And, he was mad at me for a week. A week! Because you had to win that right.”