Rudd has no regrets – and many good memories to savor – in retirement
Ricky Rudd looks as if he could climb back into a race car and give everyone on the track a run for their money.
Rudd has no intention of climbing back into a race car, not to give everyone a run for their money or anything else.
“I miss the people. I miss the fans. I miss driving the race cars,” Rudd said recently. “I don’t miss being gone seven days a week. I don’t miss the travel.”
More than three decades in the sport, he says, “was a pretty good length of time. I enjoyed it. I had my day, but I’m settling in. It’s a transition, but I’m OK.”
Rudd, 53, stepped away from NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series following the 2007 season, leaving a long, impressive list of accomplishments: 906 career starts, 23 wins, 194 top-five finishes and 374 top-10s. He also finished 10th or better in the point standings 19 times, including a best of second in 1991.
He drove for some of the sport’s top owners after getting his start in 1975 with Bill Champion. Junie Donlavey, Bill Gardner, Richard Childress, Bud Moore, Rick Hendrick,
Robert Yates and the Wood Brothers all fielded cars for the Chesapeake, Va., native.
Their choice in driver often paid off as Rudd quickly became one of the sport’s top road-course competitors and was equally adept at contending for wins on the series’ shortest venues.
Eventually, Rudd got the itch to be his own boss and started his own team with the hope of moving into the ownership role once his driving days had ended.
“We did it for six years,” he says of the team’s 1994-1999 run. While he won six times as an owner, financial struggles eventually led him to close the operation and move on.
“It wasn’t that I was done with it; it was done with me,” Rudd says. “I couldn’t raise the money to do it correctly, so we just shut it down, and I drove for some other guys.”
Looking back now, he said the team’s inability to stay afloat “was probably a blessing in disguise.
“I was having trouble raising the money it took to compete back then, and it looks like the trend now is that you have to have some big-buck guy bankrolling the thing,” Rudd says. “Even some of the guys that were solid car owners [then] have now merged. … It’s become too corporate for me to be able to handle that.
“I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was a blessing when it ended up not working out. I didn’t lose my shirt when I shut down.”
It was as an owner/driver that Rudd earned perhaps his most noteworthy win, capturing the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1997.
These days, Rudd spends time with his family and quenches his competitive urge by riding mountain bikes. Dirt bikes lasted only until a relative was seriously injured in Mexico.
“That got to be a little too dangerous,” he says, “so now all the dirt bikes are parked, and we’re riding mountain bikes. I entered a mountain bike race about three or four weeks ago, just to see …, but I’m no threat to dominate or win. I just wanted to see what I could do.”
Yes, he occasionally checks in on the goings-on around NASCAR but only “every third or fourth race.” That has been more than enough to understand what most fans already know – Hendrick Motorsports remains atop the Sprint Cup realm.
“When you get inside the Chase [For The Sprint Cup], it seems like nobody really has anything for them,” he says of Hendrick. While some teams may contend for wins during the course of a race, “when it gets down to the later stages, it’s like, ‘OK, guys, it’s time to go.’ And Jimmie [Johnson] or Mark [Martin] or whoever … it seems like they flip a switch … and they’re gone,” he says.
“I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, but you can’t fault the Hendrick organization. They’re doing what they can do with their resources, and they’re doing a great job. … It’s as if they’re a half a year ahead of everybody.”
Son Landon, who recently turned 15, grew up around the sport, but Rudd says the youngster is no gearhead.
“If it’s anything in racing, it would be on the engineering side,” Rudd says. “He’s pretty good on the technical stuff. He’s pretty smart. Not like his dad.”
Many would argue that last point. Ricky Rudd walked away with no regrets and a career filled with fond memories. And that may have been the smartest move of all.
