| Doug Yates, CEO of Roush Yates Engines, is on the verge of a couple milestones as we enter the 2025 NASCAR season. First, the organization is sitting on 199 all-time NASCAR Cup Series poles (points and non-points events) going into next week’s Daytona 500 and 198 all-time series victories (points races only). The organization has been in existence since 2004 when Robert Yates and Jack Roush merged their engine operations and promptly won a championship with Kurt Busch. Yates spent time today talking about the organization’s success and what lies ahead in Daytona. DOUG YATES, CEO, Roush Yates Engines – HOW DOES IT FEEL TO START THE SEASON KNOWING YOU HAVE SOME MILESTONES RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU? “It’s a great feeling. I’m looking forward to those milestone wins, but it really goes back to my dad, Robert Yates, and Jack Roush believing in putting Roush Yates together in 2004, our very first season together, and with the backing of Ford Motor Company – Edsel and Bill Ford and their team – gave us the opportunity to be in this position, so I’m very thankful of that. That 2004 season was a very special season, showing up at Daytona and sitting on the front row for the Daytona 500 with Greg Biffle and Jack Roush and Elliott Sadler and my dad. Winning the championship with Kurt Busch later that year and now 21 year later we’re here talking about 200 wins and getting ready to go back down to Daytona and have another shot at winning another Daytona 500. If we do so, that would be our 11th Daytona 500 for Ford Motor Company and that’s always the goal. Winning The Great American Race is something really special and thinking back to that 1992 season when Davey Allison and our 28 Texaco car is where it all started.” YOU WILL HAVE THE 01 AND 66 AS OPEN CARS. IS THAT IT? “That’s it.” SO IS THERE ANYTHING THEY CAN DO FOR QUALIFYING OR THAT YOU CAN DO FOR THEM? “Obviously, we’ve been in communication with those guys. Their ask is, ‘What can we do? How can we go down there?’ We’ll prepare as always and make sure we put the best lap down that we can on Wednesday night. They’ll probably have to race their way in on Thursday, but Speedweeks will be a little bit different this year from that respect, kind of back to where it used to be where those guys have to battle to get in the race, but I feel like we have a good shot and hopefully we can. We have 12 full-time teams. Hopefully, we can add those guys and have 14 in the 500.” IS THERE ANYTHING SIGNIFICANT AS FAR AS RULES THAT WILL IMPACT YOU IN THE ENGINE DEPARTMENT THIS YEAR? “I think it’s business as usual this year for the engines. Looking ahead, there are gonna be some engine rule changes to try to be more cost efficient, but this year the engines are the same – 18 long block seels. If you have a race-winning engine ahead of the playoffs, it will have to be inspected before the playoffs start. That’s probably one of the rules that will be changed, but pretty much very similar to last year on the engine rules.” HOW DID YOUR DAD CONVEY THE IMPORTANCE OF THE DAYTONA 500 TO YOU? “I started working with my dad when he was at Junior Johnson’s in 1971-72. As a kid, I would go there. Our house was on the same road as the shop. Junior and Flossie’s house was right next to the race shop, so we would go down there and work at night. He would come home for dinner and I would go down there and spend time with him and hang out with him, but probably where it really hit me how important the Daytona 500 is was when Bobby Allison won that race in 1982 and seeing what that meant to my dad and our family was really important, and then we spent all kinds of time working together, whether it was me being there on Saturday or full-time when my dad had us on the engine shop in 1985. Driving to the racetrack and all we talked about was winning at Daytona and how special it is and how much we were willing to work. That 1992 win, the ‘91 winner – Texaco actually sent us to Hawaii as a family vacation. We went for a seven day trip and about three days in my dad and I looked at each other and said, ‘We’ve got to get home and start working on Daytona.’ So we went to my mom and sister. I think they’re still probably salty over that decision, but we came home and for about two and a half months straight we took the clocks off the wall and worked seven days a week to win that race with Davey and Larry McReynolds and our team. That really ignited that fire and it still burns pretty hot today.” HOW OLD WERE YOU WHEN YOU WOULD GO DOWN WITH HIM TO JUNIOR’S? “Five years old. Maybe four, five, six, seven we were up there. We lived there for four years, from 1971-75 and I’ll go back – elementary school. The cool part was going down there and hanging out with him and then seeing Junior come by later in the night patting my dad on the back. He’d say, ‘Hey, boy. We’re gonna win this race. You’re doing a great job.’ He was a good motivator, and then on Saturday morning we got together at Flossie’s house and she would cook country ham biscuits for us, so my dream as a kid was to own a race shop and have my house right next to it. That’s what I knew. That’s how I grew up, but it started young and through the years just working with my dad. He would drive the truck home and drove the tractor trailer sometimes and he would bring it to the house when we lived off Central Avenue here in Charlotte, and leave it there and I would drive with him back to the shop and we were on to the racetrack. It was a full immersion and it was just really cool being around him. He’s my hero and being able to spend time with him was really one of the best parts about NASCAR, but it started pretty young.” DID YOU START WORKING FOR HIM IN HIGH SCHOOL? “Yeah. Actually, my senior year in high school my dad had his own engine shop down at the race track and we did General Motors teams at the time. We worked three months straight, seven days a week. It was actually motivating to go to college and try to get a degree and do something different, but at that time my dad had that shop. He was doing engines for Rick Hendrick for the 5 car and Gary Nelson was there, so Rick offered him a job to come work at his engine shop there and about the time Lee Morse and Ford Motor Company called and said, ‘Hey, we want you to come and run Ranier-Lundy. Waddell is gonna leave and do something different,’ so my dad had a decision to make. He met with Lee out at the airport and met with their team and decided that was the route he wanted to go and it turned out to be a great decision and gave him the opportunity as an engine builder and team manager that when Harry and JT decided they wanted to get out of it and were gonna put the team up for sale – my dad, the son of a Baptist preacher and humble beginnings, didn’t have a whole lot, but he did have his house paid for and he was thinking about it. That’s when Davey Allison went to my dad and said, ‘Robert, you can do this. I’m behind you.’ He shook his hand and said, ‘As long as you have this team, I’ll be your driver.’ My dad went home and told my mom he was buying a team, or asked her. I’m not sure how it went, but maybe their stories are different, but they sold their house and moved into an apartment and bought the team Oct. 10, 1988. I was in college and my mom called and said, ‘Hey, when you graduate will you come back and work for the family business?’ And when I graduated in May of 1990, I came back and that’s where it all started. Back then, we owned six race cars, three engines and maybe 12 people working there, and now with NASCAR’s leadership and this great sport we’re all blessed to be part of, it’s a huge industry and employees a lot of people and you can have a real career in this sport. Back then, we made it to the next year and did pretty well, and today we’re all really blessed to be part of this deal.” HAS THE EXPANSION BY RFK AND FRONT ROW CHANGED ANYTHING ON YOUR END? “That’s a great question. I’m really proud of RFK and Brad Keselowski and Steve Newmark and what they’re doing carrying on Jack Roush’s legacy and team, and the next step for them was to add another car. So, to be able to put that together and pull that off, I talked to Brad last weekend and he’s excited about that team and the resources that it will bring. If you’re gonna compete at the highest level in this sport, you need to get to that three-car program, so they did that, along with Bob Jenkins and Jerry Freeze and Front Row Motorsports adding to their team. We’re excited for those guys. Bowman Gray was a great event, but it was also practice for us to get back in the routine and get going by communicating with our teams and starting to do that this week and really get in the swing of things. We’re excited about both of those teams expanding. We were really nervous about the Stewart-Haas deal because we weren’t sure what that was gonna mean for us and our business. Losing four Cup cars is a major change for an engine business, but to add two of those back with Haas Factory Team and Cole Custer and Joe Custer keeping their team intact, and for Front Row to bring in Noah Gragson and their team, or however you want to look at that, but them adding a third car was an OK outcome for us. We’re carrying on building that. Now it’s really getting down to the racing and working with those guys and trying to give them what they need to be successful with those three-car teams.” WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THE NASCAR MACH-E AND HOW IMPORTANT IS IT FOR FORD TO BE A LEADER IN THE ELECTRIFICATION SPACE? “How cool was that event? I mean, wow. That was awesome and I applaud Jim Farley, Mark Rushbrook, Bill Ford, his son, Will, and Edsel Ford and their team. What they’re doing with racing and the racing programs right now is really strong, and I think that they’re trying to look at all aspects of it. Congrats to them and their team for winning at Daytona with the GT3. Entering Formula 1 next year is a huge step in the partnership with Red Bull, and the electrification piece is just another aspect. I think they’re working really hard to just build out their entire racing portfolio, whether that’s NASCAR V8’s or street car versions or the hybrid technology with Formula 1 or full electric, so I think it’s a good time for Ford Performance and they’re making some really awesome cars. The Mustang, GTD. The Ford Bronco is incredible. The Ford family was founded on racing. Henry Ford on Oct. 10, 1901 won a race in beating the best racer in the world, so it all is still going on today and the Ford family is still behind it, so I think it just shows their commitment to racing and they’re doing some really cool things.” HOW HAS BUILDING ENGINES FOR THE DAYTONA 500 CHANGED OVER THE YEARS TO WHAT IT IS NOW? “It’s changed a lot, to be honest with you. Engine building in general has changed a lot. Through the years, back when I started it was single car teams. Every single team, if you can imagine this, built their own engines and there were less rules, less restrictive, and there were a lot of areas that you could work on that weren’t in the rule book today. The rule book for the engine guys has come a long ways based on all of that innovation that happened through the years, but when I started my very first project out of school was to work on Daytona, to work on plate engines, and back then nobody really worked on them. So, my dad gave me a contact with Paul ‘Scooter’ Brothers at Comp Cams. He said, ‘Call this guy and you guys work on plate engines. Get this college kid out of our way and let us do our thing,’ and we sat on the pole for the Daytona 500 in 1991 with Davey Allison on my very first project, which was very cool. And back then, not only just the iterations. We didn’t have the test facilities we have today. You could work on all kinds of creative things. The carburetors were kind of wide-open. Getting more air flow through the carburetors was a big deal. Back in the day, they had an intake manifold with a device down the center of it that would magically float up and create like 20 more horsepower. I’ll never forget one Friday night we’re downtown testing on our single dyno and we had put this insert in the manifold, tack welded it in there. I made a dyno pull, I always ran the dyno, that’s what I loved to do was run the dyno and test, and this engine picked up 20 horsepower. So a 400 horsepower engine had picked up 20. What in the world? How did that happen? So we shut if off. Went in there and checked everything. It looked OK. Ran it again and up 20 again. We shut it off and went in there and the center of the manifold, that insert, that tack weld came loose and it came up to the center of the restrictor plate. It was like, ‘Oh, boy. Now what do we do? We’ve got to figure out how to do this.’ So that was an example of something you would go to the track with and have an advantage. I mean, when we went to Daytona in 1996 we had a special carburetor that there was no rules against it, but we had offset some things. It flowed a lot more air and made seven more horsepower. Dale Jarrett and Ernie Irvan were our drivers. My dad would not let us run those carburetors until Saturday afternoon, so we showed up and we qualified third of fourth, something like that. We ran the Clash and I’m sitting there this young kid, ‘Dad, we’ve got to run this thing. We’re gonna win this race.’ He said, ‘It’s not time yet.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, man.’ So we kept going. We got to Saturday morning and he was still, ‘No.’ Every practice he was still no and then Saturday afternoon we went up in the trailer and these carburetors were up in the lounge. Back then we had cabinets up in the lounge and he said, ‘Boys, it’s time.’ And I said, ‘Oh, man.’ So we put them on and we were gone, and so that night I didn’t sleep five minutes thinking about how we were gonna get through tech with this carburetor. Steve Allen tuned the 88 car and I was the tuner on the 28 car and so I waited and waited and drug my feet to go through tech, and he had already gone through. I said, ‘How did it go?’ He says, ‘We got caught.’ I’m like, ‘You’re kidding me.’ He says, ‘Yes, I am kidding you.’ So, I went through and got through and, sure enough, about 40 laps into the race or something like that we had the ignition box go out on the 28, so we were done. The 88 goes on to beat Dale Earnhardt in the very first race for the Ford Quality Care No. 88. That was the very first outing for that car and that team and it was a great start to what ultimately ended up in a championship run, but back then you would never load the trailer until you had an advantage, so you would work, work, work, work and just finally at the last minute you would load the trailer and go. Today, these engines and teams are prepared well in advance because you can’t do that for 12 teams or 14 teams with the scale that Roush Yates has or Hendrick or Toyota. But it was a lot of fun and it was a lot of creativity and I really enjoyed it, and I just cherish being a part and sharing some of those stories. I’ll say this. We never cheated. We never did anything outside. If it wasn’t in the rule book, we did it or tried it, but if it was, we didn’t do it and I’m proud of that as well.” YOUR MOM MUST HAVE BEEN A SAINT BECAUSE WHEN SHE WAS ASKED TO MOVE OR SUPPORT YOUR FAMILY, SHE DID IT. “Yeah, no doubt. My mom has been fantastic. Growing up, I was my mom’s son and then I got handed off to my dad for my adult life, but she was very supportive and even to the end of my dad’s deal, he would talk about without her allowing him to do what he did, he would not be the man he was or accomplished the things that he accomplished.” WITH THE EXTRA PRACTICE AT DAYTONA ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, DOES THAT IMPACT ANYTHING YOU TELL YOUR TEAMS ON HOW MANY MILES THEY CAN GO? DOES IT CHANGE ANYTHING YOU DO? “That’s a great question. We talked about it. John Probst asked us as an engine builder group in one of our monthly meetings, do we have issues with that. Is that gonna be OK? At Daytona, that will be one engine for the entire week, of course, and that engine will see about 900 miles, so it’s still well within the limits of the engine. It’ll actually probably get everything broken in and make sure nobody has any issues. I don’t envision anybody doing drafting laps, so I think from exposure of how many laps, I don’t think it’s gonna be that many. We’re not that concerned. It’s probably more like what we used to be. We’re gonna change valve springs after the 150 race anyway for the 500 to have fresh valve springs on it for the race, so I think from our end it’s probably different, but probably more the same as it used to be.” DOES THE CHANGE IN THE COURSE AT COTA CHANGE ANYTHING? “We’re working through that. As you know, everybody has access to simulators, so our teams are running laps. When they go to the simulator they have different power curves they can select that kind of helps us to find how we set up the engine with the intake manifold and the exhaust system and cam timing and the things we can change, so we’re still working through what COTA looks like, what a best lap run COTA looks like from the engine torque curve, but we will definitely be making changes and adjusting in preparation for that event.” WHEN BEFORE THAT EVENT DO YOU HAVE TO KNOW? “Today, we need about six weeks notice, so we’re gonna need those answers pretty soon. I don’t know how many weeks out we are, but we’re talking about it now. We’re a little late on that, but we have a meeting on Monday afternoon to look ahead with the production and development department and say, ‘Hey, what events are coming up? Here’s when we need those decisions and what are those decisions?’ And then from there we can start building the components, prepping those components and intake manifolds and getting the calibrations, make sure we have all that stuff ready when the engines go across the dyno and get signed off.” |
