Q&A: Ricky Rudd, Robert Yates.

Saturday, 23rd December 2006

After a year away from the sport Ricky Rudd will be back on the full-time Nextel Cup tour in 2007 with his former employer Robert Yates and will be looking to help rebuild a team with whom he enjoyed three successful seasons between 2000-2002.

Previous Page

“We were a fairly young team at that time and I'm not so sure that isn't what helped to drive us apart, but I think I'm a smarter person right now than I was three or four years ago. I've still got that competitive nature that I had and I think a lot of things that go on in this sport is that you're together almost more so than you are with your family. I've got brothers and sisters and I know we've bickered all our lives, but yet we still love each other. I like to compare it to something like that. You spend so much time around each other that you can't help but to have disagreements and I think maybe the way we handled those disagreements, we might face them a little earlier instead of letting them fester like maybe we did last time - bring them to the table and let's discuss them and that's something we probably didn't do a very good job of last time."

WHEN DID THIS POSSSIBILITY COME UP AND HOW LONG CAN YOU CONTINUE TO DRIVE?
RR "I'm not really sure. It's amazing the power the internet has because about the time we started talking was about the time it started showing up a couple of weeks ago. We had some really brief conversations probably even six months ago and really, at that time, I was non-committal and teams were really working hard to put their operations together. The ones that maybe were gonna have changes were making them back as far as early spring last year.

“At that time, I was not ready to commit, so I couldn't expect any team to sort of wait for me to make my decisions. It's kind of ironic the way it ends up. I guess Dale, I'm not sure exactly when Jarrett decided to make his change, but that left an open seat in one of the powerhouse organisations late in the season when a lot of operations were wrapped up at that point. Anyway, I'm happy the way the timing worked out, but as far as how much longer I want to do this, I don't really think I can put a time on it. Obviously age, I'm 50 years old, but my dad lived to be 80 and was still running bulldozers up until about two weeks before he died and could really do a good job with them, so I think until your skills start to slip. Is that at 51, 52? Is that 61? I'm not really sure.