Ricky Rudd, driver of the No. 21 Motorcraft Genuine Parts Taurus, will make his 56th career start at Bristol Motor Speedway this Saturday night. The No. 21 Wood Brothers Racing Motorcraft Genuine Parts team tested at the .533-mile track in northeastern Tennessee earlier, and Rudd says he is happy with the way it turned out. Rudd answers questions from his fans this week about that test, racing at Bristol, his relationship with crew chief Michael (Fatback) McSwain, and the current location of the car in which he won the famed Brickyard in 1997.

RICKY RUDD - No. 21 Motorcraft Genuine Parts Taurus -

HOW DID YOUR TEST GO FOR BRISTOL? "I thought it went really well. We carried two cars there and spent time in both of them. For about three-quarters of the day I wasn't really happy with the car - I was concerned about it - then about 2 or 3 o'clock in the afternoon Fatback (Michael McSwain, crew chief) hit on a combination. He wasn't really happy with what he was seeing on the watch and the way it looked on the race track. So, in the afternoon he hit on something really, really good. I'm really happy with it now. It was good on a long run, it was good on a short run."

GOING TO BRISTOL SINCE 1971 AND I HAVE ATTENDED EVERY RACE. I HAVE NOTICED AFTER THE FIELD GETS SINGLE FILE AND HALFWAY THROUGH THE RUN, YOU REALLY RUN A LOT FASTER OFF OF TURN TWO THAN ANY OTHER DRIVERS. FROM THE GRANDSTAND IT LOOKS AS IF YOU ENTER TURN ONE ABOUT A THIRD OF A CAR LENGTH (WIDTH) HIGHER, AND IT REALLY SEEMS TO WORK ABOUT 35-50 LAPS INTO A RUN. WHY IS THIS? "Really, that line that the fan is speaking of, that's pretty observant to see that, but what a driver is doing is he's moving that line around to match up with the way the car is driving at the time. A lot of times the car goes through a cycle that where in the beginning of a run it's loose. So, instead of entering a turn wide, you'd enter shallow - you'd actually leave the wall sooner and come down the track sooner, because if you'd try to arc it in you'd spin it out getting in the corner. As a driver, you're always trying to change that line a little bit. If you're making that wide arc into the corner and then drop down, it's usually because the car is tight, it might have a little bit of a push in it. So, you tend to, they call it 'squaring up the corner.' Usually whatever the chassis is asking for, you'll move that car around. Most times it's one or two feet. It's not much more than that at Bristol, two or three feet max."

IF MY MEMORY IS CORRECT, WON'T THE BRISTOL RACE MARK THE ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE RICKY RUDD/FATBACK MCSWAIN REUNION? AND, WHAT AN IMPROVEMENT. ARE YOU GOOD FRIENDS OR DO YOU JUST SPEAK THE SAME LANGUAGE? "I just think that we have a really good mutual respect for one another, and if you're not working good on a given day, you're not handling good, there's no finger-pointing. I think there's enough confidence in both of our abilities. I know he's a great set-up guy, and I think he thinks I can get the job done when we get the car under me, so there are never any diversions, it's always working 100 percent toward the same common goal, which is to get the best out of the car that we can on that day. It's just the communication. You know, he's really good at what he does. The way he likes to set cars up, he has a really good understanding of what I want in a car before I even get to a race track. And a special knack on the communication side is really excellent. We've had some really good runs, but unfortunately we haven't really been able to capitalize on some of the finishes that we deserved, but the performance is there. You'd always like it to be better but it's definitely a big improvement over previous years."

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CAR YOU WON WITH AT THE BRICKYARD? "That car is sitting in a museum in Portsmouth, Virginia, right now. It's been there for about eight or nine months. The city of Portsmouth built a brand-new museum, and it's mainly a stick-and-ball sports museum, and they wanted a motorsports exhibit. We had the Brickyard car for so many years; I was saving it under a blanket, I had it covered up in storage, pretty much, with a motor in it, ready to go. That's where it is. It has a Taurus body on it; when we won at Indy it had a T-Bird body. So other than the body shell, everything else is the original car."

I KNOW THAT ALL RACE CARS COST A LOT OF MONEY TO BUILD. DO YOU BRING A BACK-UP CAR WHEN YOU GO TO ALL OF THE RACES - ROAD COURSES, IN PARTICULAR? "They keep enough cars going all of the time, there's always a car under a construction at all times. The road-course car that we've run this year, there's a little history behind that car. It was the chassis that we had won our last race with, which was Sears point in 2002. That was sort of a specially built car by Fatback and Hoyt (Overbagh, engineer) at the time, and they wanted to standardize their cars at Yates and they were going to do away with that car in the system. So, Fatback said he'd like to have it and that's how we got the car. But they did a major rebuild and major update to it once we got it over to the Wood's shop. The road-course animal is a little different. Those chassis tend to hang around a little longer than your average chassis - I think because you only run them only once or twice a year. But, our backup car is a decent car. I don't think it was quite as good as the car we ran, but I think it was going to be a good backup and it was not an oval-track car converted; it was a true road-course car."