On Sunday afternoon, March 2 of 1975, Ricky Rudd strapped into a used-up No. 10 Ford owned by veteran Winston Cup Series backmarker Bill Champion.

That day, at the 1-mile North Carolina Motor Speedway near Rockingham, the 18-year-old Rudd began a racing career that would span parts of 33 years, all in what is now the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series. He started 26th in the Carolina 500 and finished 11th, a humbling 56 laps behind winner Cale Yarborough. Two weeks later, in his second career start, Rudd qualified 23rd and finished 10th in a 500-lap race on the half-mile Bristol Motor Speedway. He was somewhat better this time, finishing “only” 44 laps behind winner Richard Petty.

As much as anyone at NASCAR can determine, Rudd remains the only driver in the modern era (since 1971) to begin his Cup Series career without any stock car racing experience. None whatsoever. No Saturday night short-track jalopy races. No formal driving schools. No feeder-system tryouts. No Jack Roush-type “gong show” auditions. There had been go-kart and motorcycle racing, but Rudd had never driven a race car in competition before that day near Rockingham.

Well, except for the visit to what was then known as Langley Field Speedway.

In January 1975, Al Rudd Sr. took his sons, Al Jr. and Ricky, from their home in Chesapeake, Virginia, across Hampton Roads Harbor to the weekly NASCAR short track near the NASA wind tunnel in Hampton. At 53, Champion wanted to quit driving and concentrate on running his team. He had an old car for sale and hoped one of the Rudd boys might show some promise on the flat, 4/10-mile bullring that had hosted seven Cup races in the ’60s and ’70s.

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“I guess I got the ride because Al (his brother) spun out more than I did,” Ricky said several years after the Langley tryout. (Despite living nearby, he had never raced there.) “Besides, my brother was more of a mechanic than a driver. He had started in go-karts later than me and was pretty good, but he was more into the mechanical side than the driving side. He didn’t have a deep desire to drive. I don’t think any of us knew what that trip to Langley was going to lead to.”

Before The Beginning

As a kid, Richard Lee Rudd watched enough racing to know that’s what he wanted when he grew up and graduated from Indian River High School. His father once worked in an auto parts store where NASCAR legend Joe Weatherly sometimes hung out. Al Rudd Sr. raced at bit, and that impression stayed with Ricky from his earliest days.

“At maybe 6 or 7 I’d go to Langley and Moyock (a one-time NASCAR track in northeastern North Carolina) and watch the races,” he said. “I couldn’t wait to get there. We’d pull up at Langley or Moyock and I’d take off running through the parking lot, running up to see the cars. I wanted to see them, feel them, be there near them, hear them. So, I knew for a long time what I wanted to be. Whenever we played in the yard at home I’d run around the outside of the house, like I was a race car.

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“But I wanted to be a Formula 1 or an IndyCar driver because that was open-wheel and I was into go-karts. It wasn’t Mario Andretti for me as much as it was Dan Gurney. For some reason, Dan Gurney was my man, my hero because he was open-wheel, too. I had a lot of respect for him; we became friends and it was a huge, huge thrill to drive for him (in a sports car race) at Daytona Beach. I had a lot of respect for him. I was pretty smart in school ... brainy, I guess—Junior National Honor Society and all ... but I was more into racing than I was into academics.”

The Early Struggles

Rudd made 906 Cup Series starts between Rockingham in 1975 and the 2007 season finale at Homestead, Florida. He did four races for Champion in 1975 and four with his family’s low-budget team in 1976. (The highlight was a 10th at Daytona Beach in July ’76). His family cobbled together a 25-race schedule in ’77 that produced 10 top-10 finishes and Rookie of the Year honors. With finances an issue, Rudd made only 13 starts in 1978. Four more top-10 finishes continued to show his promise as a driver. Here was a bright, ambitious, hard-working kid who could make low-budget equipment run pretty well at times.

“I don’t think anybody realizes how much we did with so little,” he said of his family’s efforts. “We didn’t have all the tubing and sheetmetal and parts that other teams had. We didn’t know any better than to take a salvage yard truck at 10 or 11 at night and go out into the yard to get a hood or door off an old wrecked car. We’d bring it back to the shop and beat on it and make it into whatever we needed. There were just a few of us and we worked ridiculous hours. Heck, we were young and didn’t know any better. We thought everybody did it like that.

“And we didn’t have the money for me to go short-track racing for a year or two to learn what I was supposed to be doing. My dad said this is what we have to race on and we can’t do weekly racing and Cup at the same time, so let’s go with Cup. He was always up for an adventure. So, we learned as we went along; that was the best way for us. It would never work these days, but it worked for us back then.”

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Impressed by the young Virginian’s talent and persistence, team owner Junie Donlavey put Rudd in his No. 90 Ford products for a 28-race schedule in ’79. Well-known and highly respected, Donlavey’s team helped Rudd get four top-five finishes, 17 top-10s and the first of his 18 top-10 points finishes. That overachieving performance should have led to more, but Donlavey ended their partnership after one season. Suddenly, after coming so far, the promising young driver was back with his own family team facing an uncertain future.

The Most Important Race

The Rudds faced a major crisis in ’80. Over the previous five seasons they’d run 48 races from their own shop and 28 from Donlavey’s, and despite modest success they didn’t feel they were making much progress. They certainly weren’t rich—Al Rudd ran an auto parts/salvage yard—so their decision was, should they shut down and admit defeat or double down and roll the dice on one last major effort? Too stubborn to quit, they went all-in for the National 500 at Charlotte Motor Speedway in October ’80.

Let Rudd tell the story:

“Late that year we decided to pour everything we had into going to Charlotte for the 500. We had an old Monte Carlo sitting in the corner of the garage, a car that hadn’t been run since ’78. I mean, our family team had been done since ’78, the year before I went to Donlavey for one season. D.K. Ulrich was married to my sister (Carolyn) and he offered his shop near the speedway for us to use.

“Linda (Rudd’s wife) got a job at the Charlotte ticket office and sort of pushed me to get that car going. So, I worked on it every day until we took it over to the track for a test. It was 15th-fastest or something like that. My brother (Al Jr.) had built the engine, and Randy Dorton put a carburetor on it. (Dorton eventually became the Hendrick Motorsports engine builder; he died in the company’s plane crash near Martinsville in 2004.) And Jimmy Makar was there helping out (well before he became an important fixture at Joe Gibbs Racing).

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“Well, (legendary crew chief) Harry Hyde came walking through the garage that day and stopped, and we got to talking. He looked at the car and said, ‘I see some things I can help with. Nothing major, just a few adjustments.’ He said to take it to his shop (across from the speedway) and he’d help us. When I said, ‘Harry, I can’t afford that,’ he just said, ‘No charge.’ So, we took it to him that day and brought it back about a week later for the race.”

Rudd qualified the old (refurbished) No. 22 car on the outside pole beside Buddy Baker and finished a lead-lap fourth behind Earnhardt, Yarborough and Baker. “That opportunity changed everything,” Rudd said 39 years later. “All of a sudden the phone was ringing off the hook.”

Among the callers were noted team-owners Bill Gardner and Mike DiProspero of front-running DiGard Racing. Darrell Waltrip had left for Junior Johnson’s team, so they offered Rudd a 10-year contract that paid 25 percent of purse earnings. Finally, after six years of penny-pinching uncertainty and mediocre equipment, the 24-year-old racer seemed on his way.

Well ... not exactly

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The Teams

Other than a handful of fits and starts with lower-grade teams in the startup days, Rudd had success with almost everyone he drove for.

-- In 1979 he had four top-fives, 17 top-10s and finished ninth in points with Donlavey’s tight-fisted No. 90 team. “I didn’t have any money (to contribute) and Junie needed money and didn’t have any, so he fired me after one year,” Rudd said. (The next year, ’80, he ran a handful of races with his family team with one important result; more on that later).

-- He thought his ’81 ride with DiGard was his breakthrough. But despite 14 top-fives and 17 top-10s, Bobby Allison replaced him at season’s end in the No. 88. “We signed for 10 years at 25 percent,” Rudd said, “then they brought in Bobby for ’82. They wanted to sub me out to other teams and make money off me. I told them I hadn’t worked that hard to get where I was and drive junk. They gave me my release after I went to the sponsor (Stokely-VanCamp/Gatorade) and said, ‘go ahead, sue me, but I’m not doing this.’ ”

-- Richard Childress had quit driving in mid-‘81 and hired former champion Dale Earnhardt to finish the season. When Childress realized his team wasn’t good enough for Earnhardt, he let him go to Bud Moore for ’82 and ‘83. “I didn’t have anything for ’82 and neither did Richard, so he called me,” Rudd said. “He had enough money for the ’82 Daytona 500 and maybe six more races. Soon after, he got a sponsorship deal with Piedmont Airlines, so we ran the next two full seasons. Finally, Richard had the money to race, but still didn’t have enough really good people.

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“We had some success in the No. 3 (wins at Riverside and Martinsville in ’81), but Richard and Dale were big buddies. They hunted together and were close friends. I didn’t know it, but all along (while driving for Moore) Dale had been working to get my deal with Richard. That really disappointed me because I thought Richard and I had been good for each other. I’m still trying to figure out how that happened.”

-- When Earnhardt returned to Childress in ‘84, Rudd replaced him on Moore’s No. 15 team. In their first start Rudd flipped and tumbled between Turn 4 and the trioval in the Busch Clash at Daytona Beach. Four days later, he finished seventh in his 125-mile qualifying race. Three days after that, he finished seventh in the Daytona 500. A week later, his face still badly swollen and his eyelids taped open, he gutted out a 500-lap victory at Richmond. Even old-timers admitted they’d never seen anything like it.

“I thought my career might be over after the Daytona wreck,” Rudd said. “For a while I didn’t have any balance, didn’t feel anything, my eyes were crossed and I had vertigo. I went to the medical school in Richmond (at Virginia Commonwealth University). Basically, it was a concussion, but they didn’t know if it would last three days, a week. a month or forever. It was still bad at Rockingham, but it got better after a few weeks. I probably shouldn’t have been in the car for a while, but I wasn’t going to sit out because we still had to eat.”

Rudd won with Moore at Riverside in ’85, at Martinsville and Dover in ’86, and at Atlanta and Dover in ’87. “That was a really good organization and I liked it there,” he said. (Moore was a decorated D-Day infantryman and one of the sport’s favorite people; nobody didn’t like Bud). “But the sport was changing, becoming more technical with more computers and technology, and I didn’t see that Bud and his good group of people were keeping up with it. He knew how to win races and build motors and how to build and prepare winning cars, but I didn’t see he staying on top of the technology that a lot of other teams were getting.”

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-- In that regard, team owner/drag racing legend Kenny Bernstein was the direct opposite. The NHRA was years ahead of NASCAR regarding in-race technology, and Rudd liked the way the No. 27 team was embracing computers and data acquisition and flow charts. When Rudd and Moore separated on good terms after three years together, Rudd went to Bernstein to work with crew chief Larry McReynolds and chassis expert Bob Riley.

“We won some races (at Watkins Glen in ’88 and in Sears Point in ’89), but should have won a lot more,” Rudd said. “Except for Robert Yates, we had as much horsepower as anybody. But the engines didn’t last; one of Kenny’s drag racing motor builders was doing the work and we blew up a ton of races. I probably should have stayed with Kenny, but there was Rick Hendrick, knocking on the door.

-- From the outside, Rudd’s 1990-1994 time in the No. 5 at Hendrick Motorsports looked perfect. But from closer up – a view hardly anyone outside the organization got – his five years with owner Rick Hendrick and teammates Ken Schrader, Darrell Waltrip, Jeff Gordon and Terry Labonte were anything but pleasant.

“I’d finally gotten to the Hendrick level; I’d made it,” Rudd explained as if he’d crested Mt. Everest. “But being with a company with multiple teams (a first for him and a relatively new NASCAR concept) was a pain in the butt. Schrader and Darrell fought harder to keep knowledge and information from each other and me than they did to beat the competition. None of them wanted to share anything. The engine situation was bad and the crew chiefs hated each other. They almost wouldn’t speak to each other. They’d even lie about what setups they were using. They played politics like you wouldn’t believe. In many ways, it was a terrible place to be.

“One shop was here and another was over there and the third was somewhere across the road. There wasn’t any cooperation at all. Rick was the key, but he was still relatively new to Cup and he was busy trying to get his dealerships up and running. He wasn’t at the tracks every weekend and there was a lot of inner bickering going on without him there. Nobody pulled together or helped each other.”

Even so, Rudd won one race annually during his five years at HMS: Watkins Glen in ‘90, Darlington in ‘91, Dover in ‘92, Michigan in ‘93 and Loudon in ‘94. “Midway through the ’94 season I decided I’d had enough,” he said. “It wasn’t a very pleasant place to be.”

-- Rudd spent 1995-1999 with his own No. 5 Rudd Performance Motorsports team. (Primary sponsor Tide left Hendrick to go with him). He continued to win: ’95 at Phoenix, ’96 at Rockingham, ’97 at Dover and Indy and ’98 at Martinsville. Perhaps predictably, his streak of winning at least once a year for 16 consecutive years ended in ’99. In a dose of harsh reality, he had just three top-five finishes and two other top-10 finishes, and was a career-worst 31st in points.

“The burnout factor had set in,” he admitted. “There had been a lot of disappointments as an owner. Mostly, I had a team of understudies, guys who were really good but not very well known. As we had success, bigger-name teams saw who we had and came after them. They offered bigger salaries and took them away from me. That’s when I clearly realized how cut-throat the business could be. What disappointed me was that we didn’t build our team just once, we were in a constant state of rebuilding. That took a toll on me, so I shut down.”

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-- He found relief with owner Robert Yates’ No. 28 cars, enjoying the 2000-2002 seasons free of the pressures of being owner/driver. He had 12 top-five finishes but was winless in 2000, then won at Pocono and Richmond in ’01. He got the last of his 23 career victories at Sears Point in ’02 at age 45.

-- His last multi-year ride was with Wood Brothers Racing in 2003-2005. “We did okay at times, but it just never clicked with them,” he said of the legendary Virginia-based team and their No. 21 team. “When I was there it was the traditional (famous?) family operation with generally worthless tech support from Jack Roush.” Rudd and the Woods struggled all three years: 108 starts together, just seven top-five finishes and 17 top-10’s. In a word, they were dreadful more often than not.

-- At age 49, Rudd sat out ’06, thinking he was done. But when Yates called late that year, Rudd agreed to return to the series. “That team would have shut down if I hadn’t taken the ride,” Rudd said. “At the time, UPS (sponsor of Yates’ No. 88 with Dale Jarrett) was sending all its good people and money to the other team. Robert was going to keep building engines and Dallara (of F1 and IndyCar success) was going to do the chassis work for almost a brand-new 28 team. That would have been a great combination that could have won races. With his power and Dallara chassis and engineering and technological help, it would have been a great team. But the Dallara part never happened.”

In an injury-interrupted ’07 season that limited him to 31 starts, Rudd had only one top-10 finish. It came as no surprise to anyone that after 33 years, he’d had enough. “It wasn’t the way I wanted it to end,” he said, “but I came in quietly and I wanted to go out quietly.”

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The Numbers

With 906, Rudd is second only to Petty’s untouchable record of 1,182 career starts. He won 29 poles and 23 races, had 194 top-five finishes and 374 top-10 finishes. He was top-10 in Cup Series points 19 times, including a best of second behind Earnhardt in 1991. He won at least once annually for 16 consecutive years, tying with Rusty Wallace and Jimmie Johnson for third all-time behind Petty’s 18 and David Pearson’s 17. His 788 consecutive starts from the 1981 Daytona 500 until his brief 2005 walkaway is second only to Gordon’s 797.

He won at 14 venues: once each at Atlanta, Pocono, Rockingham, Darlington, Michigan, Loudon, Phoenix and Indy; twice each at Riverside, Richmond, Watkins Glen and Sonoma; three times at Martinsville; and four times at Dover. There is some symmetry to his victories: his first was on a California road course (Riverside) in June of ‘83; his last was on a California road course (Sears Point) in June of ‘02. In addition to those 23 victories, he finished second 30 times. Other than the 1991 IROC title (he outraced Earnhardt in the final round for the trophy), he cherishes the 1997 Brickyard 400 with his own team as his most meaningful victory.

“The next morning (after Indy) I was back in the office, trying to pay the bills,” he said. “People say it was fuel mileage, but it wasn’t. It was strategy. The key was clean air, and the crew worked pit strategy to get me in clean air. We couldn’t run back in the pack, back in the dirty air, so we worked pit strategy to get in clean air. The big guys were still running at the end, so it wasn’t like a bunch of people had wrecked or fallen out. That was a big win for me.”

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Will The Hall Call?

Rudd first appeared on the NASCAR Hall of Fame ballot in 2016, eligible for the Class of 2017. Inexplicably to many, his name remains on the ballot, still waiting to be called.

Those recently inducted ahead of him Childress, Hendrick, Gordon, Roush, Roger Penske, Tony Stewart, Ron Hornaday, Waddell Wilson, Ken Squier, Mark Martin, Bobby Labonte, Joe Gibbs and Ray Evernham, plus the late Benny Parsons, Alan Kulwicki, Buddy Baker, Davey Allison, Red Byron, Raymond Parks and Robert Yates. Although Rudd won’t publicly bitch about NASCAR politics, he wonders whether two moments might be keeping him out.

First, he and NASCAR president Bill France Jr. had words after the fall ’88 race at North Wilkesboro. Rudd and Earnhardt banged into each other that afternoon, each inflicting only minor damage on the other. Near halfway, Earnhardt spun Rudd without major consequences. Much later, after chasing him down, Rudd repaid the incident, turning Earnhardt without major damage. In Rudd’s mind, France was more upset about what he had done to Earnhardt (a longtime good friend and the face of the sport) than what Earnhardt had done to him (sort of a second-line junior star).

“Bill was at my door when I came in after the race,” Rudd recently said on a Dale Earnhardt Jr. podcast. “He said, ‘What was that altercation all about with the 3 car out there?’ I said to him, ‘Well, you saw it ... he spun me and took me out.’ Then Bill said, ‘Oh, no, I’m not talking about that. Later in the race, you came back and hit him. What do you have to say about that?’

“I looked at him and said, ‘I’m really disappointed in myself.’ He looked at me kind of puzzled, like he wanted to say something like, ‘good, that’s what I wanted to hear.’ Then I said, ‘Yeah, I’m disappointed that I didn’t run that son of a bitch through the wall.’ Bill looked at me with a smirk and just walked away. The next morning, on my fax machine, was a notice from NASCAR about a $10,000 fine for conduct detrimental to stock car racing.”

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Three years later they got into a lengthy, acrimonious, closed-door argument after officials declared Davey Allison the ’91 Sears Point winner. Rudd had bumped past Allison in the last turn on the next-to-last lap and taken the white flag leading. He finished the race expecting the checkered, but instead got the black. Moments later, right behind him, second-running Allison took the checkered. “I didn’t wreck Davey or spin him, I just moved him,” Rudd said. “But that (ruling) burst my bubble. You can race and beat the competitors, but you can’t beat NASCAR. They’re going to do what they want to do.”

By The Way

-- The Rudds’ only child, 25-year-old Landon, is a Manhattan-based accomplished musician and background music performer for movies and television. He showed some go-kart talent as a kid, but never really took a strong interest in car racing ... which is perfectly fine with his parents;

-- It seems inconceivable now, but Champion entered Rudd in the Saturday afternoon preliminary 300-miler before the ’75 Daytona 500. He had a Sportsman car (now, Xfinity Series) for his new driver that easily reached 180 mph. (Remember, Rudd had topped out at less than 100 mph during the Langley test a month earlier.) “I didn’t know what I was doing,” Rudd admitted. “I remember being scared to death.

“All I knew was to go as fast as I could and not lift at the end of the straightaways. It felt like a school bus with a big steering wheel and ungodly horsepower. Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t make the field because I really didn’t want to be there. I didn’t know how to get out of it without embarrassing a lot of people. We found out a day after qualifying what was wrong, but it was too late ... and maybe that was a good thing. That was a rude awakening.”

-- Rudd didn’t do any sort of farewell tour because he didn’t want to “retire” amid great hype and hoopla, then maybe change his mind and come back a few months later. “I saw some people rip off the public—and, no, I’m not going to mention any names—with farewell tour stuff,” he said. “It was ‘buy this farewell tour shirt or buy this farewell tour hat; he’ll never be back here again.’ I just didn’t want to do that. I didn’t think it was fair to the fans.”

-- His only regret remains not hanging with Hendrick long enough to weather the storm until the organization became what it eventually did. “I’d been there for five years and I didn’t see it getting any better,” he said of the internal chaos and unreliable motor program. “It seemed like the right decision at the time. I grew up in a house where there were five kids, so it was natural that there was a lot of bickering always going on. The bickering at Hendrick just wore me down.”

-- The Rudds are living well in North Carolina, healthy, wealthy and totally content in a spectacular lakeside home. (Somebody named Michael Jordan is a seldom-seen neighbor.) “The adrenaline days are over,” Ricky said. “Nothing will ever replace them. I did some (very serious, very competitive) go-kart racing for a few years, but it was too much work. There was a day when I finished second in the heat race and could have beaten the guy (in the feature) if I changed a tooth on the rear sprocket. I was hot and sweaty, and it was a really hot day. So, I debated whether to change the sprocket and beat him. I looked out at the track and looked at the sun, and I thought, ‘No, I have the energy to change the gear or energy to run the feature, but I don’t have the energy to do both.’”

Today, the Rudds’ toughest decisions might be how to take their coffee at the nearby Starbucks, what kind of pastry looks good and where do they want to stretch out and nap? Will he read for his book club on the sofa in the sunroom overlooking Lake Norman, in the chaise on his pier beside his boats or in the TV room? He doesn’t necessarily watch NASCAR (“The average guy can’t relate to the technology and all the stage stuff”) but loves supercross, which he considers spectacular entertainment. And there’s always the choice of what set of wheels does he want to drive today ... the Porsche, the Jaguar or the pickup truck?

Life is good. We should all be so lucky.

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