Rudd awakening

Thursday, March 2, 2000 | 10:46 a.m.

As soon as Ricky Rudd took his first tour of Robert Yates Racing after selling his own team and signing on to drive for the legendary car owner, he knew he made the right decision.

"I took one look at (Yates') operation and wondered why I didn't do this years ago," Rudd said as he prepared for Sunday's CarsDirect.com 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. "I guess I didn't realize what I was up against."

As one of the few owner/drivers in the NASCAR Winston Cup Series the past six years, Rudd experienced his fair share of success. He won six races, including the 1997 Brickyard 400, and posted 62 top-10 finishes.

But the past three seasons proved to be lean ones for Rudd, who never finished higher than 17th in the Winston Cup standings and saw his 16-year streak of at least one win come to an end last season.

"It really worked good for about the first three years," Rudd said of owning his own team. "In 1997, we won two races and won the Brickyard 400, but it was starting to get to be a struggle then. Even though we won two races in '97, the sport was starting to change.

"At that point, I probably didn't do enough of a good job going out and soliciting money. We got behind the money curve and that just sort of snowballed. We had a talented bunch of people, but we were only able to hang on to a handful of them; we were constantly training new people. We were probably 50 percent under-funded for what it took to do the job right."

Rudd suddenly found himself 100 percent under-funded when primary sponsor Tide elected to move its sponsorship to Cal Wells' upstart PPI Motorsports team and driver Scott Pruett for the 2000 season.

"We were facing a major expansion," Rudd said. "We needed to expand to a second team -- we really needed to have done that probably two years prior -- and we needed to start an engine room.

"There were a lot of things we were needing to do and it was going to take a lot of money to do and we just didn't have it. I think our sponsor, Tide, not renewing in the middle of July, it was pretty much a clear picture of what we needed to do at that point."

When Tide informed Rudd that it would be ending its sponsorship of his car, he began weighing his options. When he learned that Yates was looking for a driver to replace Kenny Irwin in the No. 28 Texaco/Havoline Ford, Rudd jumped at the chance.

Sort of.

"I almost passed up the opportunity (to drive) for Robert Yates because I was so busy trying to pursue sponsorship on my own team," said Rudd, who has 20 Winston Cup victories. "I just about missed the deadline -- I don't think Robert thought I was serious about wanting to drive for him.

"When I finally made the call, we were coming down to a self-imposed deadline of about mid-September; if I couldn't secure sponsorship for our team by mid-September, then I was going to go to work for Robert. Here you've got one of the biggest teams in racing and they're sort of being held at arm's length."

Rudd eventually extended his arm to shake hands on a deal to drive for Yates. He said he hasn't had a moment's regret since.

Rudd, now a teammate of reigning Winston Cup champion Dale Jarrett, qualified on the front row for the Daytona 500, won a 125-mile qualifying race at Daytona and finished 15th in the 500. He followed that effort with a sixth-place finish last weekend at North Carolina Speedway.

"I'm not smart enough to have planned this, but the cards just sort of fell that way," the 43-year-old Rudd said. "I couldn't be happier now. I'm such a determined person that I'm bound and determined to make it work.

"I feel like I've got maybe three to five years of really good driving left in me. I've got some years left but I wasn't going to have enough years left to build that team that I had into a championship-caliber team, and something I really want to do before I retire from the sport is to win a championship."

Shortly after Rudd signed on with Yates, some racing observers tabbed Rudd as one of the contenders for the championship this season. Rudd called such talk "overly optimistic."

"There's no guarantees (of a championship) where I'm at now, but we've got the tools to work with," Rudd said. "We've got the engine program, we've got Robert Yates and (engine builder) Doug Yates -- the savvy that knows how to do it -- and we've got a teammate who won the championship last year.

"There are a lot of things in place that make this a pretty powerful team."

More importantly, Rudd said, he once again believes he has a chance to consistently win races -- something he said was missing the past few years.

"Just to be able to sit in a fast race car, knowing when you go to the track that you've got a shot at winning that race, it's an awful nice feeling," he said.

"Becoming just a driver again, it's like waking up and being a kid again; all the things I love about racing are still there and all the things that I was beginning to despise about it are now gone."

Rudd said his six-year stint as a car owner has left him reconsidering his role in the sport once his driving career is finished.

"I was looking at what I was going to do when I do get out of the driver's seat and I thought an ownership role would be nice," Rudd said. "But after doing that for six years, owning and driving, that is not my top priority, to be a car owner again.

"You never say never, but right now I have no ambitions to be an owner again."

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