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OH, FOR THE GOOD OLD DAYS; Robert Yates Racing is broken and needs fixing.(Motorsports)
Byline: AL PEARCE
Robert Yates used to walk through his race shop and admire the victory lane photos. He always saw smiling faces, energy, excitement, commitment, teamwork and supreme confidence. For his Ford-based NASCAR organization, those were the good old days. In fact, those "old'' days were as recent as last fall.
Today, Robert Yates Racing flounders somewhere between decent and dreadful. Neither Dale Jarrett nor Elliott Sadler is good enough to reach the top 10 and qualify for this fall's 10-race Chase for the Championship. (Together, they have one pole, one top-five and four top-10 finishes in 24 starts this year.) Jarrett is leaving after this season and talk is that UPS might follow him. Rumors persist (denied at every turn) that Sadler wants out and that crew chief Tommy Baldwin (also denied) is on shaky ground. Yates recently fired general manager Eddie D'Hondt and dumped his ARCA and driver development programs. Crew chief Slugger Labbe is midway through his four-race suspension for cheating last month at Richmond. Oh, yeah... and Jarrett is 16th and Sadler 17th in points.
Is it any wonder that Yates, a 63-year-old racing junkie, sometimes questions the man in the mirror? "I don't know if my arms are as long as they used to be,'' he says when asked about getting his arms back around his company. "What I'm evaluating is, are my arms the right arms to be wrapped around it? Do I have enough energy to keep doing this? When I don't want to go to the track, it's time to change. And I haven't looked forward to going to the track recently.''
He once did; witness his smile in those victory lane photos. RYR has won at least one race annually since its founding in 1989. Among those 57 wins: six each at Michigan and Richmond, five each at Daytona Beach and Charlotte, four each at Pocono and Talladega, three each at Sonoma and Darlington, and two each at Indy and Texas. Its drivers have finished top 10 in points 12 times, including Jarrett's title in 1999. In recent years, though... almost nothing. Jarrett has finished 26th, 15th and 15th the past three seasons and Sadler 22nd, ninth and 13th. The organization has just 15 wins in 453 starts this decade. Clearly, it's no longer among ...
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