UAW-GM Quality 500 - Ricky Rudd Notes

Ricky Rudd, driver of the No. 21 Motorcraft Taurus, heads into this weekend's race at Charlotte following a season-best second-place finish at Kansas. This week Rudd answers questions from his fans regarding being part of a one-car team, pit strategy and his greatest achievement in racing.

Do you feel that you are at a major disadvantage being with a one-car team? "No. Not a major disadvantage, no. You miss things, like, during a race being able to go down to your teammate and find out what air pressure they're running, and things like that. But, so far, yeah, we've had problems, but, really, we've done better since we broke away from that Roush engineering agreement where we used to see a lot of notes. We saw a lot of notes on different things, and, to me, we're running better now than we did before. There's no question we're running better now - without the information."

I've heard that Roush has split with the Wood Brothers. Why do you think this happened? "There's been a friendship over the years, and there's been a motor lease agreement in place. This year they actually had an engineering agreement, and part of that agreement, crew chief and engineer, were furnished by Roush. That was the way it was. But, when we got Fatback, that went away."

In watching some of the races where you have to make a green-flag pit stop, who decides how long you stay out and what is the reasoning? Because it always seems that the 21 team stays out as long as possible and the other guys pit somewhat earlier, and those guys who pit earlier get the fresh tires and make up some lost time, where we wait and take tires at the last minute and end up a lap down. What is the logic there? "That's a good a point. That's really a crew chief call. The gamble you make, it's not the driver's call and it's generally the crew chief's call, and it's based on, I guess, the crew chief watching a lot of different variables at that time, but it's sort of a gamble. If it's a track that's really tire dependent and you can change tires and pick up a few seconds a lap, if you short pit, take your tires early, you're going to make up ground. If you gamble, your play is if you don't get any cautions at the right time - if you get a caution at the wrong time, you come in and pit early, the caution comes out and then you're two laps down or three laps down - so, it's a gamble, a little bit of a risk. In another way, it's a real conservative no-gamble to go out and stay out as long as the leader does. But, if you're losing a lot of time, you should roll the dice on occasion and make up the lost time with fresh tires. Again, I'm not the guy that makes the call, I'm not sharp enough to make that call, I don't have all the information. The crew chief makes that call."

What brought you and the crew to the conclusion to pack the car up and go home at Bristol? "We couldn't get up to speed. They worked on it to get it going, went back out on the race track. NASCAR has a minimum speed, and we couldn't get there because the car was so badly damaged. As a matter of fact, that car ended up being totally destroyed, we had to throw it in the trash can. But, it was bent-up so badly that we couldn't get up to a minimum NASCAR speed. If we hadn't have brought it in, NASCAR, they were watching us, and they would've given us a couple of more laps and then it would've been mandatory to bring it in. The car was just too badly damaged."

What do you feel is your greatest achievement in racing? "I don't know. If you base it on wins, just the wins that we've had, the consistency, 19 times in the top 10. There's a lot of little things. I don't think anything in particular stands out. One thing that doesn't seem to get mentioned, I think, I won the IROC championship in '92 and had to beat Earnhardt in the last race to do it. I'll remember that for a quite a while. That was a big achievement that you don't really see much about. So, I got a lot of little things that add up, but nothing in particular. The Brickyard win is a big deal, but mostly a lot of little things."