First Time is a Charm

Idiot winds, I & II, and the New England 300 from Loudon, New Hampshire

Idiot Winds........

As an old Bob Dylan fan, his "Idiot Winds" song tends to remind me of Ricky Rudd's antics this season. Rudd has really managed to out-do himself this season. He has even managed to win a race. When it comes right down to it, winning the race was one of the major nails in the coffin containing what used to be great chemistry between Rudd and his No. 28 Robert Yates Racing crew. They scheduled a party to celebrate the win and Rudd chose not to attend, then was upset with the crew because they had the party without him.

Let's face it, Rudd just hasn't been a happy racer this season. He started out early in the spring complaining about the so-called "young guns" getting more media attention than the veterans were. It seems that when you are on the back end of a career, media exposure means just as much as when you are a new-comer to the sport.

Rudd has been involved in a sea of contradiction all season. First he wanted to retire, stating that if he was going to stay in the sport that he would only work with a one year contract that would allow him to quit at the end of any given season. He didn't want to be involved in any long term contracts. Then signs a three year deal with the Wood Brothers?

Rudd was at odds with his crew chief and crew over the party deal, very few words were spoken between them. Then he wanted to be guaranteed that he would keep his same crew if he decided to stay with Robert Yates Racing?

Last week Rudd wasn't saying kind things about the Yates organization, especially their engine department. Let's face it, Robert Yates Racing furnishes a lot of racing engines for quite a few teams on the Winston Cup circuit. Sure, every now and then the engines blow up, but a lot of the time it's due to driver error, some of which involves red-lining the engines over the 9k maximum RPM settings that most of the teams abide by. Lots of times drivers get the idea that rev-limiters were made to be by-passed.

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