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Underfunded Yates Racing makes performance, sponsorship gains during debut season
By Godwin Kelly - Contributing Writer
Thursday, September 04, 2008
When the reformulated Yates Racing showed up for early January testing at Daytona International Speedway, there were no sponsor decals on those bone-white Fords, only this sad, but hopeful, message: sponsoryates.com.
The once mighty team, which wound up sweeping the front row of the 2007 Daytona 500 starting grid, had the feel of a pauper with a tin cup and a cardboard sign at the preseason test session.
Co-owners Max Jones and Doug Yates faced the media during their visit and seemed filled with grit and determination to make this two-car project work despite a noticeable lack of funding.
“We’re not the first team to come to Daytona without sponsorship money,” Jones said, chin up and chest out.
Seven months later, Jones peeled back some of the raw emotion of those early days of this team, which has its footprint in the past and its eyes turned toward the future.
“In January and February, there were a lot of sleepless nights,” Jones admits now. “I bit my fingernails down. It was like qualifying every day here.”
Fielding a pair of Sprint Cup entries with no corporate colors was somewhere between a leap of faith and an act of madness. Yates and Jones were relying on three things – name recognition, performance and a friend with an oversized garage full of goodies – to make it happen.
First, the magic of the Yates’ name in stock-car racing. Robert Yates, who is more scared of debt than an arachnophobe is afraid of black widows, sold his house to buy a one-car team from Harry Ranier in 1989.
Robert Yates suffered many setbacks during his career as a team owner, but always kept clawing and scratching his way back. He achieved the ultimate goal by winning a NASCAR Cup championship with Dale Jarrett in 1999.
By 2003, the Yates’ organization started to fall apart. Robert Yates Racing scored its last win in 2005 when Jarrett got a luck-out victory at Talladega Superspeedway.
After that, it was like watching somebody struggle in quicksand – the more they squirmed, the faster they would sink. Yates owned a race team for 19 years, had reached all his goals and was ready to exit after ’07.
“It didn’t happen overnight for my father,” Doug Yates says today. “When I started working there in 1990, after I graduated from college, it was driving to every race and washing rags to save money. He was doing whatever it took to get to the next level. My father had a vision and worked to make it happen.”
Part Two of this scheme to field two unsponsored full-time Sprint Cup cars was performance out of the box. Yates Racing had to show it could compete. Travis Kvapil, driver of the No. 28 Ford, had an eighth-place finish at Las Vegas followed by a ninth-place run by teammate David Gilliland in the No. 38 Ford at Bristol.
“This is a performance-based sport,” Jones says. “If you don’t perform, you won’t make it.”
Enter the third piece of the puzzle, Roush Fenway Racing, led by brain-heavy Jack Roush, who helped engineer the transformation of Robert Yates Racing into Yates Racing.
Roush agreed to supply revamped Yates Racing with Ford stock cars, engineering know-how and marketing savvy.
“I guess we could have gone to Hendrick Motorsports or Joe Gibbs Racing, but Doug and I both had a relationship with Jack,” Jones says. “Ford was behind us completely. It just made sense.”
Jones, 54, has been in and out of the Roush Racing camp since 1990. He was one of Roush’s top lieutenants. Doug Yates runs the Roush-Yates engine program, a deal struck by Robert Yates and Roush in 2004.
All these close-quarter relationships had some, even NASCAR’s competition department, wondering out loud if Yates Racing was more like Roush Fenway Lite.
“We expect to hear some of that,” Doug Yates says. “To work with and get to know Jack Roush has been a great thing. A lot of the reasons I’m still going is because of Jack’s encouragement. He’s a cheerleader for Doug Yates and Yates Racing to keep our program alive, which has been really nice.
“So that Roush Lite stuff doesn’t bother me. Right now we need help to get our program back to where it needs to be. We need support to get back in the game. It’s Yates Racing. It’s Max Jones’ and Doug Yates’ reputation on the line, so the things we have to do to make our program competitive is what we’re going to do.”
Roush addressed the very same concern early in the season, brushing aside the notion that Yates Racing is an annex of Roush Fenway.
“NASCAR is paying attention, but it’s gonna be like chasing snipes, they’re not going to find anything wrong,” Roush groused.
Through 24 races, Yates Racing was holding fast. The two drivers had combined for five top-10 finishes, including Gilliland’s impressive runnerup finish at Infineon Raceway. Kvapil’s best result was a sixth-place run at Talladega.
Both drivers are 32 (their birthdays are a month apart) and have fewer than 100 Sprint Cup starts. Both said the first half of the season would be a learning experience and to expect better results in the dash to the finish.
“This team is virtually brand new,” Kvapil says. “This whole team is working together for the first time this year. The second time around at the race track, you always have a good notebook to look at, and a better place to start.”
“A lot of people don’t realize, seven months ago when we started, when we moved into that shop on Dec. 15, we built all new cars,” Gilliland says. “We’ve hired 80 percent new people working in the shop. I’ve got a new teammate, a new crew chief. It’s all new.”
Yates Racing may not have mega-sponsor decals on its cars, but they have done pretty well to date. Gilliland has had the same sponsor, freecreditreport.com, for 18 races.
Kvapil’s No. 38 Ford has been more of a patchwork effort. He’s had 11 different sponsors on his hood, from Zaxby’s restaurants to the California Highway Patrol.
“We’ve made it to this point, piecing things together,” Kvapil says. “We’re in a lot better situation now than back in February. Back then, we weren’t getting many phone calls. There wasn’t much interest in sponsoring Yates Racing. Now we’re getting performance on the track and attracting attention.”
“We are committed to 2008,” Yates aid. “We said from the outset, we thought it would be lean. We didn’t know the economic situation would be as tough as it is. I think we’ve got some really good things in the works for next year.”
Lean is the key word here. Jones says Yates Racing has 51 employees and everybody wears several hats at the race shop.
“We all work hard,” Jones says. “We all multi-task, but I don’t believe we’re going without.”
Jones and Yates trust their team will snag a win before the season ends. The theme throughout the company is build on each success. The vision includes two, fully decaled cars running for a victory each weekend. Gilliland looks into the crystal ball to describe what he sees for the ’09 season.
“I definitely see both cars having color on them and having great sponsors by next season,” Gilliland says. “The more successful teams in NASCAR right now are four-car teams. We’re two.
“I think the vision of Yates Racing is try to grow it from more than a two-car team. I see that in the future. Max and Doug are thinking long-term and that’s what it takes to dig your feet in and stay around a long time in the series.”
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