Rudd became involved with motor racing in the 1930s as an informal assistant to Prince Chula and Prince Bira's White Mouse Racing team, which inspired him to pursue engineering as a career. Family influence led him to take up an apprenticeship at Rolls-Royce in early 1939, where he remained through the war years. His engineering studies were accelerated by the outbreak of the Second World War: the Selection Board placed him in Motor Car Design, then run by Chief Technical and Development Engineer W.R. Harvey Bailey — the designer of the Falcon aero engine in World War I. After a period there, Rudd became assistant to George Hancock, reviewing failure reports and correlating data to improve repair outcomes. By the summer of 1944, Rudd was effectively running the Defects Investigation Department until it was merged with the Repair Technical Office. After the war, many Rolls-Royce Derby staff moved to Hucknall; Rudd moved to the Merlin Programme but was increasingly drawn into the motor racing scene.
Rumours within Rolls-Royce about difficulties with the Rolls-Royce-supplied supercharger installation at BRM led to the offer of a posting there, which Rudd accepted. In 1951, he was seconded to BRM to assist with development of the much-delayed BRM V16 engine — originally for "three or four months". He never returned to Rolls-Royce, becoming part of the BRM team for almost two decades. Rudd was involved in the development of the V16 and the four-cylinder P25 cars. After the Rubery-Owen takeover of the team, Peter Berthon and Raymond Mays were sidelined following a driver strike threat, and Rudd assumed full technical control of the team in 1960.
Rudd implemented proper engineering procedures within the team. He drove a monocoque Killeen car at Folkingham, increasing his interest in vehicle rigidity. His spaceframe and monocoque V8-engined designs took BRM to one Constructors' and one Drivers' World Championship.
His H-16 engine for the new three-litre formula — based on two of the successful 1.5-litre V8s mounted on top of each other — proved heavy and overcomplicated. Rudd maintained the H-16 would have been successful had the drawings been followed accurately, noting the engine had heavier castings than planned, an unfavourable power-to-weight ratio, and breathing difficulties that only began to improve when it fired as a sixteen-cylinder engine rather than two eights. While the H-16 struggled, Rudd organised Geoff Johnson to design a compact sports-car racing V-12 for customer sale, an engine that became the foundation of renewed success after Rudd's departure from BRM. As a sideline, Rudd and Peter Wright designed a ground-effect car that never raced; driver John Surtees was adamant it could not be made raceworthy.
During a poor 1969 season and following management changes at BRM, Rudd left for Lotus Cars, eventually working up to the position of Engineering Director on the road-car side. He was not directly involved in racing, which Colin Chapman oversaw. Rudd's achievements included development of Lotus' own four-cylinder engine and improvements to production quality. He also developed Lotus as an engineering consultancy working on high-technology projects for the wider automotive industry.
Team Lotus were struggling in the mid-1970s, and Rudd led the research effort that produced the ground-effect Lotus 78, which brought the team back to the forefront of Grand Prix success — reuniting Rudd and Peter Wright, who had worked together on the unraced BRM ground-effect car. Rudd returned to the road-car side to research active suspension and turbocharging, and continued consultancy work for other manufacturers. After Chapman's death in 1982, Rudd took on an increasingly significant role within the business.
Following the conviction of Fred Bushell for financial irregularities related to DeLorean, the Chapman family — who retained ownership of Team Lotus — asked Rudd to head the racing team. He returned to racing for a year in 1989 until the team was sold, then retired to work as a freelance consulting engineer.
In retirement, Rudd remained active in the Society of Automotive Engineers. He wrote a widely acclaimed autobiography, It Was Fun: My Fifty Years of High Performance, and collaborated with Doug Nye on a multi-volume history of BRM covering the front-engined cars, spaceframe rear-engined cars, and monocoque V8 cars, with a fourth volume planned for the H16, V12s, and Can-Ams. Rudd was married to Pamela and had three daughters. He died in 2003 at the age of 80.
This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule.