If you’ve been racing a Ford product in NASCAR competition since 1992, you have been running the Robert Yates designed cylinder heads and intake manifold. The heads, which were originally designed in house and were protected as such for the 1991 season, became the must use part when NASCAR instituted a rule that all teams must use an “out of the box” cylinder head, ending the ability of teams to design their own from a clean sheet. Ford knew that the Yates design was superior to all other Ford deigns and selected it as the “out of the box” for head for teams that got Ford backing.
According to a great piece on RacingToday.com, the heads went the opposite direction in design than one would expect. Equipped with small chambers and small valves that allowed the use of flat top pistons instead of a domed ones, the lack of a dome allowed for “unobstructed flame travel” according to former SVO chief engineer Preston Miller.
It is pretty amazing that they hung around for as long as they did and really never gave up much, or anything to the competition. Ford has a snazzy new competition engine called the FR9 that comes out at Daytona this year. It has some pretty large shoes to fill considering the run its predecessor has had.
