Thursday, Oct. 5, 2000 | 4:17 a.m.
Since shedding the burden of ownership and going to work for someone else, Ricky Rudd starts most days the way he wants.
At 7:30 a.m., the Winston Cup star often loads 6-year-old son Landon Lee into his family car and drives him to kindergarten. Gone are the days when he was unable to do that, and Rudd couldn't be happier.
"Just being able to drive him to school and have some kind of normal life during all this madness has basically helped me escape the mental side of racing," said Rudd, who began driving this year for Robert Yates Racing. "I've got some time for myself and my family, where the last six years I never hardly left to eat lunch.
"Now, you're ready to go racing at the end of the week."
Still, the 44-year-old driver from Chesapeake, Va., can look back on the last six years with considerable pride. At a time when multiple-car teams were beginning to change the face of NASCAR, Rudd enjoyed steady success as an owner-driver.
He set a record by winning at least once in 16 consecutive seasons, a run made in an underfunded car. When his sponsor bolted at the end of last season, Rudd folded his team.
Yates, who had fired Kenny Irwin, quickly hired Rudd. It's been a successful union. Rudd, who finished 17th, 22nd and 31st in the points race in his last three years as an owner, is sixth this season and has 10 top-five finishes.
Irwin, killed in crash three months ago while practicing for a race in New Hampshire, had just two top-fives for Yates in 1999.
Rudd hasn't won for Yates, but the owner, who also fields cars for series champion Dale Jarrett, isn't worried.
"We want to win, but we love this consistency," Yates said.
Irwin, and Ernie Irvan before him, brought a measure of uncertainty to Yates' No. 28 Ford. Both had a knack for wrecking cars and exasperating the owner.
Yates said the team has benefited from Rudd's professional approach.
"From where I stand, he appreciates the members of the team all the way through," Yates said. "It means a lot to the guys. It means a lot because they want to see him do good. He cares about people."
From where Rudd stands, that's easy. Six years of dealing with sponsors, buying equipment, handling personnel and driving the car had become too much.
"This time of day, I'd be worried about whether travel was going OK with the weekend crew, which was our over-the-wall pit crew," he said. "All those things that you really didn't think affected you, I think took a toll over the long run."
Rudd compares himself to a boxer who takes body shots while protecting his face, only to have the cumulative effect hurt him later.
"I was basically burned out and sitting there thinking, 'Man, I can't keep going at this pace,"' he said. "It's been kind of a breath of fresh air to turn around and not have to worry about all the other things."
Yates appreciates Rudd's knowledge of what it takes to run a race team, and says his contributions are evident.
"Your driver's got to be everyone on the team's hero," Yates said. "If they ... think he's not doing everything right, it's over.
"Ricky's been the guys' hero on and off the race track."
And now Rudd also can be a hero to his son, who came along after the driver and his wife, Linda, spent 16 years trying to conceive. They found out she was pregnant about seven months after Ricky became a car owner.
"I never would have started a team had I known," he said.
Despite time lost on the home front, Rudd doesn't regret that decision.
"I wouldn't trade those six years for nothing," he said, listing his 1997 victory in the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway among his proudest achievements. "I felt like that was a good chapter in my life.
"But I wouldn't want to have to go back and do it again."
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