Coca-Cola 600 - Ricky Rudd Notes

Ricky Rudd: "They are like little mad scientists - the shock guys. You put them in the corner and they go to work."

This week, Ricky Rudd,driver of the No. 21 Ford Parts and Service Taurus, answers the fans' questions about running at Lowe's Motor Speedway in the Coca-Cola 600, driving with gloves and his last set of tires at Richmond.

Considering your partnership with Roush Racing and the success Roush has had at Lowe's Motor Speedway (especially the 600), how do you feel about your chances of winning the 600 in 2004 with your team? "The thing about Roush is that you can compare notebooks all that you want to, and the chassis are built in the same shop, but the bodies are not. So all of the bodies are a little bit different from one another. So a lot of the time what works under one of the Roush cars does not necessarily work under our car or the stuff that works under ours doesn't work under theirs. And even within the teams themselves, there are a lot of differences in the thought processes about the bodies. To me, the 97 and 17 are consistently the best cars week in and week out. Mark (Martin) has been running pretty good. (Greg) Biffle's been running good at times. I'd love to have a car that built from the ground up with the body out of a Roush shop to try. But that is not the case. So comparing the notebooks doesn't really work unless it is all coming out of the same shop."

What does your team do differently in terms of chassis and engine set up to prepare for the extra 100 miles at Lowe's? Especially with the one engine rule, how do those 9500 rpm, 800 horsepower engines survive the extra 100 miles? "I can't really answer for the motor side, but on the car side it is really no different than preparing for a 500-mile versus for a 600. Usually every team will run as much tape on the grill as they can to be as aggressive as they can to make downforce and reduce drag. But the price you pay is the heating of the motor. Normally, if you run a 220-degree water temperature, you might think about 215 at the 600, just making sure you don't overheat anything. That is one consideration. Gear ratio is another. The motor guys have their own way of taking care of things. But as far as the way the driver approaches the race, there is literally no difference between a 500 to a 600 to a 400. You are just running every lap as hard as you can. I think psychologically if you've got a seat that is not 100 percent comfortable, maybe it is 95 percent comfortable, or things like that that bug you a lot of times, you'll just let them go. You might think a little harder about those things. If it is a little hot, you might add some insulation. Five hundred miles, you think, 'Oh, that's not that big a deal. It's not worth messing with.' With 600 miles there might be a little extra attention paid to driver comfort - make sure there are no hot spots in the car. At any other race, if it's bad we'd work on it, but if it's not then you just let the little things go."

How does the shock package compare/differ from tracks like Texas and Atlanta to Charlotte? How different is Lowe's Motor Speedway different from, say, Talladega or Daytona? "Every track is a little bit different. That is a pretty big science right there in itself. There is a lot that goes with it. Shocks do a lot of things. They control the race car quite a bit. That is why everybody has a shock specialist, because it has become so complicated and sophisticated. If everybody could understand it, you wouldn't have to worry about it. They are like little mad scientists - the shock guys. You put them in the corner and they go to work. They talk a different language. I feel like we've got one of the best in the business with Vince (Valeriano). But, to answer the question, every track is little different from one another. At the superspeedways, NASCAR actually dictates what shocks go on rear. They actually hand them to you when you get to the track. That leaves the teams able to play with the front shocks a little. And, now that NASCAR dictates what you run on the rear that almost evolves into what you have to run on the front. Anyway, the speedway program and the cars and everything about them makes them sort of an oddball car where you can just about take the car you run at Charlotte and run it anywhere, except for the speedway."

At the end of the California race, it appeared that the car really came alive. Do you feel like that the team is starting to figure out the aero and these 1.5-mile tracks? Or was it because of the racing conditions that the track sort of came to you? "All year there has been a lot of work going on trying to get our program better. Last year we had our short track program pretty well figured out. And, we were decent at Martinsville and Richmond this year. But there has been a lot of work going into the medium-size track program. A lot of it is stuff that these guys have been coming up with on their own. They have been spending a lot of time at the wind tunnel. There are a lot of things they have been doing with shocks and springs. They are getting better. We have an arrangement sharing information with Roush. And, we haven't discarded that information, but we've gone out on our own to answer some questions we needed to answer and the car has been running better. So we just have to keep doing what we are doing. We have seen some signs of progress here in the recent weeks. Just in the past three weeks I've seen improvement that I find encouraging."

From a driver's prospective, do you prefer the day or the night races? Other than hopefully having Sunday with your family, do you think there are advantages to the Saturday night racing for you as a driver? "I like night races from a driver's standpoint. I don't like it from a schedule standpoint. Generally, it makes for awfully long days. Just for the crews and the burnout factor, I'd rather see us race in the day than at night. I do like the schedule on Friday, but I don't like the raceday schedule where you have to sit around and wait until 5 o'clock. I'd rather come in Friday morning, condense it to two days, but don't keep everybody hanging there to start the race. I'd rather start the race at 10 o'clock in the morning, like we used to do for the July race at Daytona. That was always nice. That would be the ideal. Run your Friday schedule like they ran it at Richmond, then come in Saturday morning and race. But I understand why they do it - it's a better TV slot. And, if I was a fan I'd rather watch the race at night."

How is the feel of the steering wheel is with gloves on? Do gloves give you more control of hanging onto the steering wheel, or are they more of a protection from fire in a wreck? "I drove for years without gloves. And then NASCAR said you had to wear gloves, which you should. It's the only smart thing to do. I started wearing them shortly before NASCAR said you had to. But for years we ran without them. Really the thought process was to get the feel of the steering wheel as good as you could and the gloves would only get in the way. But the gloves they've got out today are so good that you don't really lose any feel at all."

Any comment on the last set of tires they installed on your car at Richmond? You seemed to be somewhat upset. "Well, we were real disappointed because we had come from being one of the fastest cars on the race track to just not even being mediocre. We really went away with that last tire change. Pit stops weren't just really great. The guys try hard, but you just can't give up spots in the pits like that. The biggest thing, though, was the inconsistency. I'd had good consistent tires all night and then that last set was not good. Everybody there, the whole night, were running tires they had scuffed during practice. We did the same thing. We just ended up one set short. We actually knew that the night before so we rounded up some tires. When you put on a set of tires and buff them up in practice you actually give notes back to the crew chief that this set's tight, this set's loose, whatever. We buffed six or seven sets and all of the sets were the same except one. So we discarded them. I'm not really sure why, but that set at the end of the race were real loose. Anyway, it was frustrating. We had run so well from the middle of the race on, and then we ended up getting a set of tires that wasn't good at the end. It was just disappointing. That was the biggest thing."