As a kid, Dan Keenan loved fixing things, tearing things apart, and figuring out a way to build something new. But he never dreamed his skills would one day lead to being a key player in designing a brand-new race engine for NASCAR.
After earning a mechanical engineering degree from Montana State University, he started working on dynamometers. His expertise got the attention of NASCAR race teams, and in 2000, he joined the team at Robert Yates Racing, which would later become Roush Yates Engines (RYE). In 2007, Roush Yates Engines’ President and CEO, Doug Yates, asked him to team with Ford Performance to spearhead the design of Ford’s first purpose-built, made-from-scratch NASCAR race engine, the Ford FR9.
Today, Keenan is the design and analysis manager at RYE