Zoomster.com was privileged recently to be connected to the Ricky Rudd Iron Man teleconference honoring Rudd's 656th consecutive NASCAR Winston Cup Series start at the Coca Cola Racing Family 600 at Lowe's Motor Speedway. Rudd fielded questions about his exceptional accomplishment and Zoomster shares some of those comments.

"I wasn't doing it with this Iron Man streak in mind at all."

"I was racing open-wheeled go-carts," Rudd said. "Not the short track type go-carts, but what I call the super speedway Endura go-carts that ran well over 100 miles per hour and motorcycles during the time my brother and his best friend - his best friend was Bill Champion's second cousin - and I guess they had been working for about six months helping Bill Champion out with his racecar in a town nearby where we grew up. I guess they worked with him about six months and then I'm not sure exactly how it came up, but Bill Champion was getting up in retirement years and was looking for somebody to maybe take over the steering wheel for him and my brother and his friend mentioned, 'Hey, you know Ricky's got a brother that does really good in motorcycles and carts, you ought to give him a chance.' And that's really how it kind of got started."

"I guess it would be similar to maybe playing high school basketball then going right into the pros. It really wasn't totally by design, it just sort of opportunity came up, 'Hey do you want to drive a Winston Cup car this particular weekend?' I never thought about it being a major challenge or that I wouldn't be trained or properly - I wouldn't be trained for that upcoming race, I never thought of that. I was always up for challenges. I was an 18-year-old kid that was pretty cocky from doing well in the motorcycles and the go-carts and I was up for challenges, so to have that opportunity, I didn't really think about how big of an opportunity that probably was at the time.

"I never really thought about what I was going to do when I grew up or what I was going to do for a job, I guess I was always racing. I was racing motorcycles in high school, making what I call pretty good money back in my high school days, but never really thought about - I mean I knew from a very young age, at probably nine or ten years old, as most kids want to be a policeman or fireman, my goal was to be a professional racecar driver and I wasn't satisfied with just being one, I wanted to be one of the best. I wanted to be the guy that went to victory lane. I had made my mind up at nine years old that I was going there, of course, I guess in my family nobody ever told me that that was an impossible goal, that you need to be prepared in case that doesn't happen.

"I was 18, 19 years old when I ran my first Winston Cup race and at that time period, the next youngest guy, by the time they made it to the Winston Cup level, they were in their early 30s, which was pretty common at the time. You really didn't have anybody for sure in their teens and nobody in their early 20s at that time because you had to earn your way to the Cup position and you had to go out and run the Saturday night tracks and show promise and then eventually move up. So, as far as getting any help, if you went up and asked guys, they were more than helpful to try and help you. I probably got most of my education by standing on top of the trucks at that time and watching guys like Richard Petty, David Pearson, Buddy Baker, all those greats. I'd get on top of the truck and watch them drive off in the corner, watch when they got out of gas, when they got into gas, and just studied a lot and watched them at the race track. We didn't have the luxury of watching game films like you can now, or race films, so most of my education was just by watching.

"I think that might have been one of my advantages when I started off young and then with zero stockcar experience period, I think that might have been a plus. I didn't have to spend years of undoing knowledge that did not work at the Cup level, instead, I could learn from the best in the business, kind of on the job training. I could sit and observe and watch and obviously I would run races and I paid a lot of attention. A lot of my early years were strictly paying attention, because again, when I started my first race, I didn't know what all the flags meant, that's how green I was. Go-carts, I think we had a green flag and a red flag and a checkered flag and that was it. When I got to Cup racing they had all kinds of different colored flags. I didn't even know what the meanings of the flags were, so it was definitely on the job training for quite a few years, but again, the plus to that was that I didn't have to undo and unlearn a lot of bad habits.

"It's a different time in history, Rudd said. "Then at that time, I think I was 18 years old when I ran my first race and there wasn't anybody that you could communicate with that was my age. I ended up most of my friends at the race track and stuff were crew members and things that worked on the cars, because most of the drivers were older at that time. But you know, up until four or five years ago, the peak age for Winston Cup drivers, most of them ran into their late 40s and early 50s. Earnhardt himself, I think he was 51 or 52, so up until the big youth push here, which has happened in the last couple of years, 50 years old in Winston Cup or 45 in Winston Cup actually was considered prime, and obviously that's changing now."

"I'm 45, there's guys out there older than me, but breaking this career record, which means that you run more consecutive starts than anybody in NASCAR history, so you start saying, well gosh, that's a lot of starts, that must mean that you're getting old and time to retire. So that's kind of how the retirement thing probably kicked into high gear.

"I think once I got to 45, which was in September, I realistically look at that and I look at it just in the back of my mind, I said kind of a goal for myself before I turn 50 years old, I won't be in a racecar anymore, I'll be enjoying some of the fruits of being able to make it up pretty close to the age of 50 and hopefully still having my health. I've got a young boy at home, seven years old, that'd like to have his dad go watch him play baseball at the games and stuff. So, anyway, I think all of these things together, it probably makes me look at the retirement option probably more so now than ever.

"Trying to get to that streak and stay healthy. It hasn't always been easy." "I got wrecked in the Bud Shootout there with about 6 laps to go in the race and I ended up flipping some six or seven times. I spent the night in the hospital, banged up, beat up, had torn cartilage in the ribcage, my eyes were ruptured, all the capillaries in my eyes, tore all the cartilage loose from my ribcage, very sore. I came back and obviously ran that Daytona 500 and won the week after that, but that was probably the closest, injury wise I was probably in more severe pain then I had ever been before and I had to have a flack jacket and all kind of equipment to be able to basically endure the race without the pain making you blackout. That was '84. "It had to be around '88 or '89 at Charlotte. I got injured in the Winston the previous week, tore the medial collateral ligament in my left leg, ruptured a tire, blew a tire and hit the fence, back during the tire wars that were prevalent in NASCAR at that time, and basically had an injury where I tore those ligaments. The local doctors basically wanted to operate and I'd be out of commission for six weeks. Kenny Bernstein flew me up to meet Trammel of Harry Trammel's Unit in Indianapolis that evening and their outlook was a little different, it was a heavy workout regimen and workout routine with a specially fitted knee brace, and obviously it was sort of iffy what was going to happen.

"Racing, our form of the Iron Man is obviously running all these Winston Cup starts since 1981, but as far as being work to do that, it's come natural. I don't feel like I've done anything out of the ordinary that most guys wouldn't have done, maybe a couple of times I probably drove with injuries that maybe I wouldn't say 100% of the people would have drove with, they might have sat out that weekend. At that time, I wasn't doing it with this Iron Man streak in mind at all, obviously this happened way back, one of the injuries was in the 80s, both were in the middle and late 80s. Again, what I do, what I do every weekend is - and I've done it since 1981 - is go out and give 120% for the race team that I'm driving for at the time, whether it be my own team or whoever's.