Robert Yates (Left) with son Doug at Pocono Raceway in 2001. (Photo: Robert LeSieur, LAT Photographic)
If you ever spend any time with Robert Yates or his son, Doug, it won’t take long before you realize that to them running a NASCAR Sprint Cup team is little more than a necessary evil that allows them to pursue their true passion: building engines.
The son of a Baptist minister and the oldest of nine children, the elder Yates used to street race in North Carolina during the late 1950s before becoming one of the greatest engine builders in NASCAR history. He worked with the likes of Holman-Moody and Junior Johnson in the days where racers played fast and loose with the rulebook and oversized engines and doctored restrictor-plates were the order of the day.
“The cheating, as we used to call it, was fun,” Yates told me a few years ago. “It was a little bit like outrunning the police with a V-8. It was fun. It didn't hurt anybody.”
The elder Yates formed Robert Yates Racing in 1988 and enjoyed considerable success, winning 57 races, including three Daytona 500s and the 1999 Sprint Cup championship with Dale Jarrett at the wheel of his No. 88 Ford.
But while the rest of the world seemed enamored with NASCAR’s explosive growth that began in the early 1990s, Yates was never comfortable with it. Like Richard Petty, he fought the mega-team trend pioneered by Rick Hendrick and Jack Roush. Yates even actively bucked the idea of even adding a second car to his team, but ultimately did so reluctantly.
And as success in NASCAR became more and more about relationships with big-dollar sponsors and less about making horsepower, Yates became less interested in being a team owner. Instead, he grew increasingly fascinated with the environment, at one point claiming the White House had contacted him about becoming energy czar.
Since 2006, Yates’s name has been linked to every possible suitor but Paris Hilton and J. Lo, or so it seemed. At one point, he told reporters that he had informed his employees that they were all going to work for Teresa Earnhardt, who was going to buy the team.
Yates later agreed to sell his team to Robby Gordon, but on the morning the deal was to close, he called it off just an hour before the meeting at his lawyer’s office to sign the deal and pick up the check, which understandably infuriated and frustrated Gordon.
Yates also spent roughly six months in deep discussions with New York investment-banking firm Medallion Financial Group before suddenly having an abrupt change of heart on selling majority interest in the team in the summer of 2007.
“I pretty much sent a letter to everybody and said right now I'm not interested in selling or anybody investing,” Yates told me at New Hampshire International Speedway in June 2007. “I'm just going to try and focus on performance. I'm pretty much really tired of spending too much time working on something that doesn't benefit anything. Right now, the thing I don't need is money. The thing I need is performance, and I haven't found a person to bring me performance. That's what I'm looking for, just trying to focus on doing what I'm doing.”
Less than a month later at the Brickyard 400, Yates announced that his team had merged with the powerhouse IndyCar team of Newman/Haas/Lanigan in a deal that Ford Motor Co. helped broker.
Then, in early September, Yates again stunned the racing world by announcing that he was retiring, calling off the N/H/L deal and selling the team to his son, Doug. As it turns out — contrary to what was announced at the Brickyard — Yates and N/H/L had not “completed a merger, effective immediately” but had only signed a non-binding letter of intent.
