Yates Racing hopes for turnaround after frustrating first half of 2009
Bobby Labonte is 26th in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series standings in his first season with Hall of Fame Racing, which has its cars fielded by Yates Racing. // Lee Holmes, NASCAR Scene
With Bobby Labonte 26th in the NASCAR Sprint Cup standings and Paul Menard 33rd, Yates Racing hasn’t had the season it wanted to this year.
But team co-owner Max Jones says he hasn’t soured on his driver lineup despite having seen some good days go bad and some bad days remain bad.
“I won’t say I’m disappointed, but it’s not the outcome we were hoping for the first half of the year,” Jones says. “We’ve had some good runs from both teams, but we haven’t been consistent enough. We have a lot of work to do. … When we’ve had good cars and we’ve run up [near the] front, we haven’t been able to close the deal, and that’s what hurt us.”
After a first year at Yates Racing where Travis Kvapil finished 23rd in points and David Gilliland was 27th in a pair of underfunded cars, Jones’ expectations rose with Menard bringing his family sponsorship and Hall of Fame Racing providing the Ask.com sponsorship with Labonte as the driver. The team has an alliance with Roush Fenway Racing and is housed in a building next to the Roush Fenway campus and gets its cars as well as technological and marketing help from the organization.
“Everybody’s frustrated,” Jones says. “Our expectations coming into the year, I felt that Paul could be in the top 20 in points, and I felt like Bobby was a top-15 [driver] and maybe working our way into the Chase [For The Sprint Cup]. People may think that’s far-fetched, but I don’t think so.
“That’s attainable. Not this year, with the way we’ve dug ourselves in the hole, but I think that the organization and the drivers are capable of doing that if we put everything together.”
Jones says he thinks Menard’s performance at Chicagoland, where he ran well until a late-race wreck, shows the team’s potential – both of Menard as a driver and the pit crew. Menard and his Larry Carter-led team are having different issues than Labonte, who started the year with Todd Parrott as crew chief before Ben Leslie took over in April.
“It’s different,” Jones says. “Paul is working really hard with Larry on these cars and getting that feel and getting what he needs. I think Bobby, with a lot more experience, … he’s trying to get comfortable [over here]. We made a crew-chief change there halfway through that first half of the year, and I think that’s for the better for Bobby and the chemistry.”
Parrott has been spending most of his time at the shop and coming to the track on race day.
“He’s making sure our cars are prepared like we want them and just putting a little more detail into everything,” Jones says. “It was an area that we didn’t have over here at Yates. He comes on Sundays … to stay current.”
The Hall of Fame alliance, where Yates Racing fields the cars, is a one-year deal (as is the Ask.com sponsorship), and Jones hopes that it continues. He says that Menards is a two-year deal that runs through 2010. Whether Yates Racing gets another team siphoned from Roush Fenway Racing, which must cut from five teams to four after this season, is still to be determined, Jones says. Roush Fenway Racing President Geoff Smith has said he hopes to move a team to Yates but that it would depend on sponsorship.
“I’m sitting here today hoping I have two [cars],” Jones says about 2010. “I feel good about that. The Hall of Fame program, they’re working really hard on their end of it, and we’re working really hard on sponsorship, too. We have another year on Paul’s program. … I don’t know all what they’ve got going on [over at Roush Fenway].
“I haven’t really been privy to all that information. I’ve been really focused on the performance side, getting these two teams I’ve got going as well as I can. I believe the organization is capable of running three or four teams. I feel like we started two really late last year and restarted again this year. Are we running where want to run? No. But we’ve gotten a lot of exposure for the sponsors that we have, but we’ve run really well sporadically throughout the year, and we need to improve that.”
