The last race of the 2007 NASCAR Nextel Cup season is more than just to determine the champion.
The Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway is more than being the last race for the present-day race car model, ushering in the Car Of Tomorrow.
It’s the last race for two of the nicest guys who’ve ever graced this sport. NASCAR will long rue the day that Robert Yates and Ricky Rudd decided to bow out of the business.
You’ll be hard-pressed in the future to find two more honest or hard-working guys than Yates and Rudd.
It just so happened that Rudd happened to be driving Yates’s No. 88 Ford when they both decided it was time to retire from careers that can’t be forgotten and probably never will.
It doesn’t seem that long ago when Yates, one of the best engine builders in stock-car racing, came running through the garage, yelling that Harry Ranier had sold him the No. 28 team for $1.
Seems Ranier had to return to Kentucky to take care of some family business and couldn’t be worried about a race team any more. He and Yates had built the No. 28 into a formidable, dominant team at the time.
It was only fitting that Ranier turn the team over to Yates.
In the years since that transaction in the 1980s, Yates built Robert Yates Racing into one of the most powerful and respected teams in the business through his engine-building prowess. Along the way, Yates not only tasted success, but there were moments of sadness with the untimely death of driver Davey Allison.
It makes one wonder what Yates really might have accomplished had Allison been around for the duration. Likely it would have been more than just Dale Jarrett’s championship in 1999. Yates already had accomplished one championship in 1982 with the DiGard team.
Along the way, Yates relayed all his engine-building knowledge to a gifted son, Doug, who’s assuming control of RYR as Robert steps down and combines his engine-building skills with Jack Roush.
Now, the one thing missing from Rudd’s resume is a championship. That’s something the man from Chesapeake, Va., doesn’t need to leave his legacy in this sport. Rudd’s honesty and humility speaks for itself.
There are few drivers I can say never lied about anything. Rudd’s at the top of the list as being a totally honest and up-front guy.
If he didn’t know or just plain couldn’t tell you, because of the business involved in the matter, Rudd would make sure you understood before letting you walk away. It mattered a lot to Rudd to maintain that reputation; to others it didn’t matter at all.
It was in the early ’80s and Rudd was competing in one of the first Bud Shootouts (or whatever they called that non-points race back then) at Daytona Int’l Speedway. We were watching the race that Sunday at the house of Rudd’s sister, Carolyn, here in Concord. That’s when Rudd was involved in one of the most violent wrecks I ever remember seeing, spinning, flipping through the air several times, with the car coming apart at the seams.
Carolyn Rudd, at the time employed in the public relations department at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, was worried about her brother. The next time any of us saw her was a week or so later. She had taken off immediately and got herself to Halifax Hospital in Daytona Beach, Fla., to find out how her brother was doing. She knew that was the only way she’d find out the real truth.
Well, Bud Moore, who owned the No. 15 Wrangler Ford that Rudd was driving at the time, and the doctors used tape to keep his eyelids open, but Rudd was back in the car a week later at Richmond, Va., winning the race.
That was almost like the race in Sonoma, Calif., in which he out-dueled Davey Allison to win, only to be denied by NASCAR. And Allison was driving for Robert Yates at the time.
It seems like certain things have an ironic way of coming full cycle. And now Robert Yates and Ricky Rudd are stepping down together.
It’s a sad time for stock-car racing.