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."

Yates said Ragan was Ford's driver there, and that the engine also had plenty of work at Ford's proving grounds.

"And we've also got an endurance dyno at the shop, where we can load up and run simulated races, which is really nice. So we've done a lot of validation work to get it where it is today.

“

I'm looking forward to running it, but I've never driven one yet, so I don't know. You'll really be able to tell something about it when the open version comes out.

”

-- MATT KENSETH

"But it turned out that the plate engine came together a little bit better than the open engine. And you know how much I enjoy racing at Daytona and Talladega. I couldn't ask for a better place to roll it out."

Yates said Kenseth and Ragan's team owner, Jack Roush, made the decision on which drivers would debut the engine. Coming into this weekend's race at Martinsville, Kenseth is 13th and Ragan 28th in the points standings.

"I'm looking forward to running it, but I've never driven one yet, so I don't know," Kenseth said. "You'll really be able to tell something about it when the open version comes out. The plate engines are so specialized. They were pretty happy with the plate version of it when it first came out, it was a little better than what we had and probably closer on power to what Toyota and everybody else had.

"But with the open stuff, I think they've been struggling to find the power to make it better than what we're running today, but I think it's good to get it on the track, because there's a lot of different things that come with a motor that Toyota and GM have been for a long time, like that cable-driven fuel pump, so it's a good thing to run it this year so we'll have an idea about it before the Daytona 500."

Ragan said he liked the engine after running it in the Daytona test.

"It's going to be a blast to debut it," Ragan said, "though by no means are we saying that our old engines aren't up to par, but I think that the new engine is something that's going to be good, considering we're already pretty good at Daytona and Talladega, so even if we have just a little bit extra, I think we're going to be a contender."

"All of us are anxious to see it in competition for the first time," Brian Wolfe, director, Ford North America Motorsports said. "Those of us who have been involved in this project agree that one of the biggest hurdles we've faced in making this transition to the FR9 this year has been the fact the current Ford engine is still so competitive, along with the economics of obsolescing the inventory of the current engine and parts."

Despite Wolfe's optimistic outlook, the fact is at this point last season Ford teams had won eight races: Six by Carl Edwards and the first two races in the Chase by Greg Biffle. This season Ford has two victories, by Kenseth in the first two races of the season.

"This has been a tough year for us and our teams on the track, especially since we had such a strong 2008," Wolfe said. "The priority for everyone this year has been solving the on-track performance, which has slowed down the rollout of the FR9."

Every Ford driver that discussed the engine at Martinsville on Friday, where Ford's top team was eighth, with only two Fusions in the top 19, was enthusiastic about the new powerplant, and Yates echoed that in Ford's release on the debut.

"This puts us on a level playing field with the rest of the competition and it's something we're excited about working on," Yates said. "Right out of the box the engine is really impressive power-wise."

Yates said the engine was designed to aid its cooling, to marginally lower its center of gravity and improve its accessory systems.

"We feel like it's going to give us some advantages aerodynamically where, perhaps, we can tape the cars up more and run the engines hotter," Yates said. "The oiling system is designed for a racing engine. To this day, the current engine has done a great job for many years, but we've got to remember when I started 20 years ago the block was already in existence.

"So a lot of things have changed. The demands have changed. The RPM and the power levels have changed tremendously, and to have an opportunity to have something new and move forward makes this an exciting time to be part of Ford."