ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 9, 1997 TAG: 9702070016
SECTION: AUTO RACING PAGE: 31 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
For the second consecutive year, Ricky Rudd enters the Winston Cup season with a new crew chief and a degree of uncertainty about what to expect.
But there is one thing he will expect: another victory. Rudd seems fated to have one victory - no more, no less - every year. The Chesapeake driver has won exactly one Winston Cup race a year for the past nine seasons, and he's never won more than two.
But he has that streak of at least one victory a year since 1983, and he wants to keep it going.
Rudd also has finished in the top 10 in points for the past seven years, and he wants that to continue, too.
So far he's succeeded, despite becoming an owner-driver and despite a procession of crew chiefs, from Bill Ingle to Richard Broome and now to Jim Long.
``I think Jim is doing a great job,'' Rudd said recently. ``You have to know how to work with people as a crew chief, and he turns out to be really a star in that category. I like what I see in the shop.
``We were so organized, we were able to slip down to Daytona before the last race [of the 1996 season] at Atlanta and run with the 1997 rules.''
Rudd was 11th-fastest in January testing at Daytona.
The team also has added a new engineer, Garth Finley, who assumed his duties in November.
And because he uses Peter Guild's Pro Motors, Rudd has begun a cooperative effort in sharing information with the Kranefuss-Haas team and Butch Mock's team, which also use Guild's motors.
``It's one of the things we didn't want to go out and get a lot of press about; we just wanted to get reults,'' Rudd said. ``It all really came through Peter Guild. It helps with the expense side of it, too. The information is very evenly distributed among teams. There's debriefings and papers and all kinds of information that flows.''
Rudd said such a cooperative effort is needed if one-car teams are to compete against multicar operations such as Hendrick Motorsports and Roush Racing.
``This is not an effort to have a team show its inner secrets,'' he said, ``but to spell out a special project that we can pool our money for and all learn from.''
Although Rudd finished an impressive sixth in the Winston Cup points standings, won his race (at Rockingham in October) and earned more than $1.5 million in prize money, he considered 1996 a disappointing year. He is looking for better results in 1997, particularly early in the season.
``Our problem last year was we lost our engineer and we had that crew-chief change'' from Ingle to Broome, Rudd said. ``It took us a long time to dig out of that hole.''
LENGTH: Medium: 55 linesby CNB