Feb 11, 2007 4 min read

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) – If everything goes according to Robert Yates’ plan, his NASCAR team will rebound from a gut-wrenching season, and he will retire at the end of the year, handing the team over to son Doug. In this his 40th year in racing, 63-year-old Yates figures he’s had enough. Especially after last season, when he says he was so stressed out he felt at times like he actually was going to die.

“I’d go home like Friday nights or something and say I wanted to check in (to a hospital), I’m going to die tonight,” Yates said. “And they’re like, ‘You’re not going to die, there’s nothing wrong with you.’ I really felt that bad. And really, that’s just how much this business works on you. I hated it.”

Yates said he became so stressed by his team’s poor performance that his body began to stop functioning. “A mess” physically, Yates 1didn’t believe his health problems were stress-related until his doctor prescribed “green pills” – he isn’t sure what they were – to help take the stress away.

“I started taking some of these green pills for a couple of days, it was like, ‘Now OK, I know what I’ve got to do is I’ve got to make my body function,”‘ Yates said. “I don’t need the green pills.”

Yates said he’s feeling much better this year – especially after his drivers Ricky Rudd and David Gilliland were two of the three fastest in Saturday’s final practice session.

“It doesn’t pay anything to win practice, but the Yates group was down last year,” Rudd said. “There’s no question. … To have anything really positive is a good thing. There’s no guarantees this will win you the pole, but it’s a start in the right direction.”

It wasn’t too long ago that Robert Yates Racing was one of NASCAR’s elite teams, especially at superspeedways such as Daytona International Speedway. The Yates team has won three Daytona 500s and the 1999 series championship.

But it fell apart last year as the team failed to win a race for the first time since 1988. Things got so bad Yates didn’t want to go to the track.

“I felt like I didn’t deserve to be here,” Yates said. “I wanted to try to find some place to go.”

Yates skipped the Oct. 1 race at Kansas Speedway, choosing to ride his motorcycle into the Smoky Mountains. Even then, he couldn’t escape. He stopped to get something to eat, but the restaurant had the race on the radio.

“It was two hours before the race started, but I didn’t want to hear about it,” Yates said. “They had the radio so loud, it’s like, ‘Man, how can I get out of here?”‘

The ultimate blow came when longtime driver Dale Jarrett announced last year that he was leaving to drive for Michael Waltrip’s Toyota team in 2007 and took sponsor, UPS, with him. Yates acknowledged Jarrett’s departure still bothers him.

“It’s distracting a little bit, and it will be, but the only thing that will put that down is if we can consistently beat them,” Yates said. “Sometimes, you have to get slapped at pretty hard to fire you up, and we’re fired up.”

Yates said running well means feeling well.

“You ever see somebody walking around that was running good? They always walk taller,” Yates said. “That’s just the way it is.”

Yates said he hopes that feeling lasts all season, so he can hand the business off to his son without feeling as if he’s putting him in a bad situation.

“You never want to quit something when you’re having fun, and right now I’m having fun,” Yates said. “I just hope we can do that for another year. That gives me 40 years in this deal, and maybe by that time I’ll be smart enough to pass it off to the next generation and I can sit back and watch him.”

Still, Yates recognizes that it might not work out that way.

“If you see me going around holding my stomach and we’re not running good, you’ll probably figure out where I’m headed – back to get the green pills.”