MBNA Armed Forces Family 400 - Ricky Rudd Notes

RICKY RUDD: "Dover is a track where you can drive down into the corner much deeper than you think you can get by with."

With four wins and four poles, Dover has to rank close to the top of Ricky Rudd's personal list of favorite tracks on the NASCAR circuit. In the #21 Motorcraft Racing driver's 49 appearances at the Delaware one mile high-banked oval, he has posted 14 top-fives and 26 top-tens. Wood Brothers Racing also has a very good record at the speedway. Since 1972 the team has seven wins, four poles, 17 top-five finishes and 29 top-tens.

"The surface is concrete, and I don't know when the IRL cars first went there, but they complained about it and they came up with some kind of a grinding system that smoothed that racetrack out. So now we can run side-by-side through the corners. It is starting to get a distinctive second groove to it.

"All that being said, it is concrete which means that you feel a lot more wheel movement inside the car. The tires are moving around and the bodies are rocking and rolling a lot more than at some of the other tracks we run.

"The grip - you've got to be careful. The concrete tracks can jump out there and bite you. Dover tends to take rubber real good. Where the track goes from white to black it drives more like asphalt. Until that happens, the track can be unpredictable when you drive down into the corners. You've got to make sure you've got the back end of the car underneath of you.

"It's a good track for me. I've won there three or four times and we've had a couple of poles.

"Dover is a track where you can drive down into the corner much deeper than you think you can get by with. You drive down the front straightaway against the wall. When you enter turn one it feels like you are driving off a ten-story building because you are going down hill, down to the bottom of the racetrack. It is a pretty good ways down to the bottom. You want to put your left front tire down on that apron. You get out of the throttle maybe one second. You lift the throttle. And then you want to be able to run it all the way down to the floorboard.

"But you have to work on your chassis to be able to do that because you get about three-quarters of the way around that corner, and if the car is not exactly perfect it has a tendency to get up off the bottom of the racetrack. And you'll exit that corner and lunge at that backstretch wall. And before you know it, you're in the fence. Things happen very quickly at Dover.

"So you have to work on your car to be able to hold it wide open from the center of the corner into the back straightaway. You really have to have your car just right to be able to run wide open. If you don't have it fixed just right you have to run the throttle more like a dimmer switch. You are modulating between 85% throttle and wide-open throttle. Until you get your car where it needs to be before you run wide open you have to get your car handling. It's not that easy of a situation. I've been there before and could hardly get wide open unless you are in a straight line and running 85% in the corner. Then you race like you would anywhere else.

"After you exit turn two, you head down the back straightaway. As you enter the corner for turn three it doesn't seem to be banked quite as steeply as the corner where you enter turn one. You enter the corner still in the gas and you drive right on down to the bottom of the corner to the apex. You hear drivers talk about the apex and hitting their marks. There is a mark or clip point where you want your left front tire to be there at that particular point. You actually drive it way down into the corner. The track loses a little of the banking right in the center of the corner. You put your left front tire right down against the apron, out of the gas and the car usually sticks there pretty good. Sometimes they push up a little bit and you hear about "diamonding" the racetrack. You want to be able to keep it right down on the inside without making a diamond. And as soon as you lift the throttle you want to be thinking about getting back in it already.

"The car takes a real quick set right there, gets its grip, so you jump right back into the throttle. You can jump back in the throttle wide-open. The trouble you've got to keep in mind is that as you get further around the exit point of the corner before you enter the straightaway a lot of times the cars start losing their grip again. When your car is right you never lift the throttle once you put your foot back in it. Again, probably 85% of the time you are having to lift up off from wide-open back to 85% because you run out of racetrack in a hurry. It's almost as if the corner ends before it was supposed to and it tends to put you into that outside fence on the front straightaway. So you run your car according to how much grip its got and coming out against the wall, missing the wall by about a foot. That starts you down what seems like a pretty long straightaway.

"The things about Dover that are a little different; the straight-aways are banked about as much as the corners so you are always steering to the right down the straightaway. And if you have any trouble or you have some kind of a wreck in front of you, you have to be careful. If you lock up the brakes the car always heads to the inside and spins on the straightaway. There are a lot more accidents on the straightaway there than any other place we go to because it's so banked."

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