Date: October 16, 2008
Yeley would like to forget this season ever happened. He'd like team owners to forget it, too, and focus on his previous two full Cup campaigns with Joe Gibbs Racing and his Nationwide season in 2006.
"They need to look at the numbers," Yeley said. "Our program at Gibbs got dramatically better from the first year to the second. I got smarter, quit putting myself into bad positions. When I drove in the Nationwide Series in 2006, we were fifth in the points and we were up there racing with Clint Bowyer, Denny Hamlin, Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch every race and they're all in the Chase. I think I showed that with comparable equipment, I can drive at that level."
Yeley had the same good Gibbs' equipment as teammates Tony Stewart and Hamlin in Cup last year and they both made the Chase. Yeley and Hamlin arrived in Cup at the same time and his performance was often compared to Hamlin. It was unfair. Yeley has only been driving stock cars since 2004. His background was USAC's Sprint, Midget and Silver Crown cars, where he was a record-setting superstar. Hamlin came out of late models and had been racing some form of stock cars for a decade.
Yeley thought the transition from Gibbs to HoF would be smooth and he'd have access to reliable information. It turned out to be a rough ride. He also says HoF promised to make changes to the team and they were never made.
"There were relationship problems with Gibbs racing and they still have some of those problems," Yeley said. "I thought we'd have everything we needed and we didn't. We didn't even have the same chassis as Gibbs for the first six races and maybe longer. Our management and owners didn't now it. I still have friends at Gibbs and they told me it wasn't the same chassis.
"We didn't have a lot of the same components, important stuff like the suspension and steering and front sway bar."
Gibbs shared information, but it was coming from a different car. "It didn't transfer 100 percent," Yeley said.
On the HoF side, Yeley says the new people that they needed never materialized. HoF did change the crew chief prior to the sixth race at Martinsville, elevating Steve Boyer and firing Brandon Thomas.
"When I was going to HoF, I had a list of eight positions I wanted hired and improved upon, and five races into the season, the only change had been the driver."
Yeley says HoF was making progress before he was fired.
"We started running better as our relationship with Gibbs got better," Yeley explained. "I was disappointed and surprised when I was released. They told me it was a performance issue, and we were running the best we had all year."
Yeley was 36th in the driver points and HoF was 38th in the owner points when he departed. The team has used P.J. Jones and Brad Coleman for one race each, Joey Logano for two and Ken Schrader for six since then. It is 39th in the owner points.
"Hall of Fame hasn't run better since I left," Yeley said. "Look at California. When I drove there in February, we had a horrible car and I finished 29th, two laps down. Ken Schrader was 41st and three laps down in September and didn't have any problems. He can drive the car when it's right. I was running between 24th and 26th at Michigan [in June] when the engine blew up halfway through the race. Coleman didn't have any problems and he was 38th, three laps down in August."
For the whole story you can go to this link:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/tim_tuttle/10/14/yeley/index.html