10/18/2026
In 1968 Holman-Moody hired a twenty-five year old from Charlotte to run its air gauge department. Not to build engines. To measure them.
An air gauge is a tool for finding out how big a hole really is. You put a plug into the bore, the plug has small jets in its sides, and regulated compressed air comes out of them. The closer the cylinder wall sits to the jet, the more the air backs up, and that back pressure moves a float in a glass column. You are not touching the bore at all. You are reading it through the air between the tool and the metal.
It does something a micrometer struggles with. Slide the plug down the cylinder and the column tells you whether the bore is the same size at the top as at the bottom, whether it is round or slightly oval, whether it has a taper. You are measuring in ten-thousandths and finer, and you are measuring shape rather than just size.
That is the job the best engine builder in NASCAR started with, and it explains everything that came afterwards.
A racing engine is not won with exotic parts. Everybody has the same parts. It is won with the fit between them. Bearing clearance, ring gap, piston to wall, the way a main cap pulls down when the bolt reaches torque and whether the bore above it moves when it does. The difference between a motor that makes its number and one that makes its number for five hundred miles is a few ten thousandths of an inch, repeated across a few dozen places.
Yates was the man whose job was those few ten thousandths before he was ever the man building the engine.
He came from the kind of background that does not usually produce this. One of nine children of a Baptist minister. Moved to live with his sister’s family, finished Wake Forest High School in 1961 with straight A’s, and took a mechanical engineering qualification at Wilson Technical College in 1964. He had already been racing his own dragster as a teenager in the late fifties.
From Holman-Moody, Junior Johnson took him in 1970 to run his engine department. Then ten years at DiGard as chief engine builder, where Bobby Allison won the 1983 championship with a Yates engine.
In 1988 he stopped building engines for other people’s teams and bought one. Robert Yates Racing, with Davey Allison driving. The team finished second in its first race, the 1988 Daytona 500, beaten by Davey’s father Bobby.
Davey won the Daytona 500 himself in 1992. He was killed in a helicopter crash in July 1993. Ernie Irvan took the seat and was winning races until a practice crash at Michigan in 1994 nearly killed him too. Dale Jarrett came in, and in 1999 he gave Yates the championship he had spent thirty years working toward.
Yates was voted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame on the twenty-fourth of May 2017. He died on the second of October the same year, and was inducted in 2018.
A man who started by measuring holes, and finished owning the team.
