Sylvania 300 - Ricky Rudd Notes

RUDD: THE IRON MAN LEGEND CONTINUES

Ricky Rudd, driver of the #21 Motorcraft Racing Ford Taurus, will celebrate his 47th birthday this coming Friday, September 12, at New Hampshire International Speedway. Ricky is now one of the senior members of the elite group of drivers who compete every Sunday on the toughest racing circuits in the country. And the driver with the most consecutive starts ever recorded (706, and counting) is now teaching the younger set why he has had one of the most successful careers in the business. His classroom is the race track and he is instructing by example. Proof of his grit, determination and endurance has been demonstrated more than once this season.

When the shift knob broke off the Chesapeake, Va., driver's gear shift lever early in the race at the Sears Point, Calif., road course in June, Ricky stayed on the lead lap and finished the race 15th. Even though he added tape to cushion the top of the lever, off every surface he could reach in the race car, including the steering wheel, he climbed from the car with a hole in the palm of his hand.

After the Sears Point race Rudd stated, "The ball broke off the top of the shifter at the start of the race, and I got several blisters there. That didn't make things easy. That's not an excuse there, it just hurt like hell all day."

Two weeks ago at Darlington, Rudd once again proved that against great odds he can still get the job done. While many fans sought medical attention for relief from the intense heat and humidity that day, Ricky lost the power steering on his Taurus with 134 laps left in the event. And, adding insult to misery, his in-car drink system also failed.

He not only stayed on the track, but on the lead lap, and finished 16th!

"That's why they call him the Iron Man," said Wood Brothers Racing co-owner Eddie Wood after the race. "To run here with no power steering for the last [134] laps is just unheard of. You're not supposed to be able to do that. But, he did it. The steering wheel, the grip, it's down to the plastic or metal or whatever the thing's made out of. It's used up."

"That was a good deal for him. He said, 'Man, I don't know whether I can make or not,' [and we said,] 'Yeah. Yeah, you can make it. You're the Iron Man.' And he did.

"You know, the cautions fell for us when we needed them. His hands were cramping and his legs were cramping, and we were talking to him, just talking to him, you know? That was good.

"We were going to run well. We did run well. We couldn't go on new tires because of the steering and all that stuff. He could only turn it one time. Whatever he got the first time was what he was stuck with. If you look from sixth or seventh back, even with power steering, after 10 or 15 laps, he was as good as anyone."

Ricky described the final third of the race as follows: "The power steering went out. That happens occasionally. You usually have two options as a remedy to fix that. You can cut the hydraulic line if that goes out and that bleeds all the fluid out of the power steering gear, and it steers quite a bit easier. The other option is: it has an inlet and an outlet line, and if you can get to it - and nowadays they have so much stuff on these cars you can hardly get to it - but if you can get to it, you can put in a return line. The fluid comes out of the box and goes right back into it, but we weren't able to do that.

"If you cut the line there are drawbacks. You would drop fluid on the race track if it doesn't have time to drain in the pit, so we just had to continue on like it was.

"Probably the best way to describe it is, if you ever sat in your street car and turned the ignition switch off of the lock position so the steering wheel is not locked and try to turn it back and forth in the driveway. That is probably the best way to describe how the car worked.

"Power steering didn't come along until the early to mid-'80's, and I had raced probably 10 years prior to that and we had manual steering. Power steering, when it fails, is nothing like manual steering. Manual steering is much, much easier to drive than the power steering when it goes out.

"So it was kind of a freak thing. We lost a bearing in the power steering pump.

"Not only did it steer hard. It didn't steer right. If you've ever had a street car with power steering, and the engine has ever cut off in traffic, you can't hardly steer it, so you just aim it.

"I'd drive down the straightaway and then I'd have one shot to aim it into the corner. Say that the left spoke (on the steering wheel) is at 9 o'clock, I'd put it at 6 o'clock and just set it and drive it into the corner. Then if it needed to be more or less, you'd use the accelerator to make it turn more, or if it needed to turn less, then use less accelerator. So you could only basically set it one time, and then steer it with the throttle.

"You would get a little bit of help with the banking. It was a timing maneuver when you would enter the banking, and you could turn it the one time. It wasn't like it was real difficult to know when to turn it because if you didn't turn it you would go into the fence. But, I guess evidently, you do things as a driver that you don't even think about, like making corrections on the steering wheel that you don't even know you are doing. But with this you couldn't do that. You had to find some other way to make it go around the corner. You could set it just the one time. You could pretty much tell by arm positions where that needed to be, and then you would tweak or fine tune with the throttle.

"People lose power steering all the time. I've lost it before, but I've never lost like I did at Darlington. I've seen it where you lose 50 percent of the assist or 90 percent of the assist. But it definitely physically was a big workout, especially on a hot day when you need the fluids too. Those things never seem to happen when the weather is cool, or it is not that tough of a track.

"And it seems like if you ever have a failure, something else goes along with that. The onboard drink cooler wasn't working right. We could get something to drink on a pit stop, but whenever you're working that hard you need to suck a lot of fluids down on a hot day.

"It made for a pretty interesting day."

Happy Birthday Iron Man!

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