MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- Doug Yates has spent very little time at race tracks this season, but there's one race -- at a track with a huge legacy for the Yates family -- that he wouldn't think of missing.

That's next weekend's Amp Energy 500 at Talladega Superspeedway, where the Ford Motor Company's first purpose-built NASCAR racing engine, designated "FR9," will make its debut in the Roush Fenway Racing Fords of Matt Kenseth and David Ragan.

"I wouldn't miss it for anything," Yates said of the track where his team's cars have won six of the last 13 poles. "There hasn't been an awful lot to look forward to lately, but we'll get it back."

And Ford's hope is the Ford Racing FR9, a project that began three years ago. Its design was spearheaded by Yates, who's stepped back this season from his role as co-owner of Yates Racing to concentrate on the Roush Yates Engines company, and Ford Racing engineer David Simon.

Yates, who's worked on nothing but Ford engines since he got out of school and went to work at his father's company, Robert Yates Racing, was obviously enthused about his part in the project.

"It's an awesome opportunity and it's unique, with how close we are with Ford and their engineering staff, to be able to do it with our guys and their guys, at our shop and our facilities," Yates said. "It's been awesome and a great learning experience. The difficulty has been trying to juggle racing the current engine and designing and developing the new engine, but it's really an honor to be involved in it."

Speculation has percolated all season about when the engine would appear.

"As these things go, we wanted to have it out earlier this year -- in fact at Daytona in July," Yates said. "But new engines are challenging and we had some things come up that didn't quite make the grade like we wanted them to, from a reliability standpoint, so we went back to work and made some adjustments."

Yates said the group then looked at using the engine first at an "open" race, or one without the restrictor plates used at Daytona and Talladega.

"There's been a lot of testing done," Yates said. "The latest confirmation test we did was at the tire test [in September] at Daytona. We got quite a bit of miles there." (Continued)