Catchfence

The way time slips by, one often doesn’t realize how long five years can be.  Yet with word that the Yates Racing #28 team will not race again in 2009, five years suddenly seems like an eternity past.  It was five years ago that the team, numbered 38 in 2004, ended a two-year drought by winning at Texas.  Elliott Sadler was the driver and he edged Kasey Kahne at the stripe for one of the closer finishes of the decade.  Later that season Sadler bested Kahne at the stripe again, this time at Fontana in the debut race of the track’s second date.

The 2004 California 500 would not be the final win for Yates Racing – Dale Jarrett’s Talladega upset in 2005 would be the final win – but it was the effective end of winning for the car that had been the flagship of Yates Racing since Robert Yates purchased the former Ranier Racing team late in 1988.  The Ranier/Yates #28 had been a winner since Buddy Baker first put it on the pole at Daytona in 1979, and its decline over this decade has been a case study of what happens when a sport lets economic sense be trumped by the toxic mixture of a technology arms race it never needed and the greed of its top competitors.

2004 was the beginning of the end for Yates Racing when they signed into an alliance with the far-larger Roush team.  The sport’s technology arms race and resulting escalation of costs had made keeping up more and more needlessly difficult, but signing into an alliance with Roush meant an exchange of information and engineering that, theoretically, would help Yates’ teams.  But by then years of bitter experience between big teams in alliance with smaller teams had shown that “alliance” inevitably became racing’s version of master-vassal feudalism.  Though Yates won three times 2004-5, almost the only beneficiary of the alliance was Roush, and by 2005 the Yates effort, despite the Dale Jarrett Talladega win, had become less a contender than an afterthought while the engineering help from Yates helped make the already-powerful Roush fleet even stronger.

By 2006 it was obvious to all that Yates had effectively been gipped by the alliance, as the team’s competitive decline accelerated while the Roush effort rolled merrily along.  Elliott Sadler quit the team in August and David Gilliland took over; Gilliland had surprised the sport by winning at Kentucky in Clay Matthews’ Chevrolet.  But the one-hit wonder quality of that win quickly became evident as Gilliland proved unable to handle the Yates Ford.  He managed only four top-ten finishes in two-and-change seasons driving for Yates, being released after 2008.

Meanwhile, after 2007′s Ricky Rudd experiment that could only be called ill-advised, Travis Kvapil was signed to drive for the team.  The #28, retired as a number after 2002, was revived, and in the 2008 season’s first 11 races Kvapil appeared to be getting it going, with three top-tens in that span.  From mid-May, though, nothing went right beyond a pole at Talladega and a seventh at Homestead.

Now the Yates effort looks even worse than it did last year.  The #28 car appears done, while the team is strapped with the grossly overrated Paul Menard, a driver long on sponsorship dollars but long short on talent.  Menard’s lack of talent should have been clear in his days in the Busch Series when he drove Andy Petree and DEI Chevrolets and took over a year to get a top ten, this in cars drivers such as Steve Park, Ron Hornaday, and Martin Truex Jr. regularly won with.   Travis Kvapil may not have a lot of killer instinct, but at least one could see some ability in him with what he drove.

One may wind up chalking Yates Racing to yet another casualty of a sport’s evolution that wasn’t supposed to happen.  It’s no wonder why anger so permeates those who love the sport and hate what it has become, for the Yates #28 is the kind of car people can identify with, and it now appears to be done.