THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Sunday, February 9, 1997              TAG: 9702090266
SECTION: SPORTS                  PAGE: C7   EDITION: FINAL 
SERIES: NASCAR '97
        A Guide to NASCAR '97

SOURCE: BY BOB ZELLER, STAFF WRITER 
                                            LENGTH:   58 lines

RUDD'S STREAK: 14 AND COUNTING HIS ANNUAL VICTORY IS ONE CONSTANT IN AN EVER-CHANGING WORLD.

For the second year in a row, Ricky Rudd enters the Winston Cup season with a new crew chief at the helm and with a measure of uncertainty as to what to expect.

But there is one thing he will expect: another win.

Fate seems to have decreed that Rudd will have one victory, no more or less, every year. He's won exactly one race a year for the past nine seasons, and he's never won more than two in a year.

But he has that streak of at least one victory a year since 1983, and he wants to keep that going.

He's also finished in the top 10 in points for seven straight years, and he wants to keep that going, too.

So far he's succeeded, despite the move to become an owner-driver and the progression of crew chiefs from Bill Ingle to Richard Broome and now Jim Long.

``I think Jim is doing a great job,'' Rudd said recently. ``You have to know how to work with people as a crew chief, and he turns out to be really a star in that category. I like what I see in the shop.

``We were so organized, we were able to slip down to Daytona before the last race at Atlanta and run with the 1997 rules.''

Rudd was 11th-fastest in January testing.

The team has also added a new engineer, Garth Finley, who started in November.

And because he used Peter Guild's Pro Motors, Rudd has begun a cooperative effort in sharing information with the Kranefuss-Haas team and Butch Mock's team, which also use Guild's motors.

``It's one of the things we didn't want to go out and get a lot of press about, we just wanted to get results,'' Rudd said. ``It all really came through Peter Guild. It helps with the expense side of it, too. The information is very evenly distributed between teams. There's debriefings and papers and all kinds of information that flows.''

Rudd said this kind of cooperative effort is needed if solo teams are to compete against multi-team operations such as Hendrick Motorsports and Roush Racing.

``This is not an effort to have a team show its inner secrets,'' he said, ``but to spell out a special project that we can pool our money for and all learn from.''

Although Rudd finished an impressive sixth in the Winston Cup championship and won his race (at Rockingham in October) and earned more than $1.5 million in prize money, he considered 1996 an off year. He is looking for better results in 1997, particularly early in the season.

``Our problem last year was we lost our engineer and we had that crew chief change (from Ingle to Broome),'' he said. ``It took us a long time to dig out of that hole.'' ILLUSTRATION: AP photo

[Chesapeake native Ricky Rudd...]