Looking up
LONG POND, Pa. – A little more than a week ago, Robert Yates Racing announced a partnership with Champ Car standouts Paul Newman and Carl Haas that it hopes will improve the team's performance in a season that has been a struggle at times. And while the setups of open wheel machines and stock cars have nothing in common, the emotional boost from the merger seems to be doing just that.
At least based on Ricky Rudd's run here at Pocono.
Rudd qualified 21st for the Pennsylvania 500 and started to creep forward when the green flag waved, cracking the top 15 by lap 11 and then easing into 13th on lap 16. His momentum stalled there and the No. 88 failed to run a competitive lap inside the top 10, but for most of the day he remained in the top 20 and finished solidly in 13th.
For the Yates team, this was a step in the right direction.
Rudd has just one top-10 so far in 2007 in the form of a seventh-place run in the Coke 600, one of the biggest races of the season. Since then, however, he has posted an average result of 26th with only one top-15 finish (Infineon Raceway) and no others inside the top 20 – though several of his poor runs, including at Dover and Daytona, have been attributable to bad racing luck.
"We had a couple of good runs but we always had some kind of problems," Rudd said postrace. "Today was just a good solid run all day, no really crazy stuff went wrong and the car was pretty basic all day."
That nearly wasn't the case, however.
On lap 55, Rudd was nailed for excessive speed exiting the pits during a yellow flag pit stop.
"I don't quite understand it," he said. "We were running with a bunch of cars and we were speeding, but it is what it is."
The No. 88 was forced to drop to the tail end of the longest line, which put him in 28th.
As quickly as fate turned against him, however, his fortunes reversed and another caution on lap 65 put him back into contention. Rudd stayed out while many of the leaders hit the pits, putting him "right back in the hunt."
From there he ran pretty consistently for the rest of the race.
"I did my part and didn't get into any wrecks or any thing like that – it seems like that is what happens to us most of the time – (and) it was just a good solid day," Rudd said.
Sure, his No. 88 Ford wasn't perfect, as Rudd said it could have used more grip. But all in all, he didn't have much to complain about.
"Considering where we've been all year, we've had some decent runs, but haven't been able to capitalize," he said. "Today we just didn't have anything go wrong."
Rudd's teammate David Gilliland had a similar experience most of the afternoon. Like the No. 88, Gilliland's car spent much of the race in the mid-teens and low 20s until an accident relegated him to a 39th-place finish with a crippled car.
"We ran 10 times better than the first time here," Gilliland said.
Although Gilliland's No. 38 Ford ran consistently, the feeling in the cockpit devolved during the afternoon.
"We started out great and then it just kept getting tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter," Gilliland said, "and we just never could get a handle on it."
Still, even more encouraging for the team was the fact that under slightly different circumstances, Rudd might have finished even better. Bad brakes late in the race almost caused Rudd to take himself – and a few other cars &ndash out of the race.
"After that I had to lay back a little bit," Rudd said. "I think at the end we probably could've got by Kyle Busch (for 12th) for sure, but that probably would've been as far as we could go."
