Robert Yates, a preacher’s son who once aspired to drive bulldozers but instead became one of Nascar’s master engine builders and a champion team owner on the stock-car racing circuit, died on Monday in Cornelius, N.C. He was 74.

The cause was liver cancer, said Kristi Jones, business manager for Robert Yates Racing Engines.

A mechanic at heart, Mr. Yates brought his garage-tinkering to an elite level. In a Nascar career that began in the 1960s, he built engines for the racing team owned by Junior Johnson, the erstwhile moonshine-runner and driver, and for cars driven by Bobby Allison and his son, Davey, as well as Lee Roy Yarbrough, Richard Petty, Darrell Waltrip and Dale Jarrett.

His ability to produce more horsepower out of engines helped lead to 77 victories in Nascar’s premier racing series, which for many years was called the Winston Cup. In 1983, he was the chief engine builder for Bobby Allison’s Nascar championship. The next season, he built the engines that powered Petty to his 199th and 200th wins.

Allison was irked that Mr. Yates was making engines for him and his rival Petty at the same time. “He can do it,” Allison told The Pensacola News Journal in Florida in 1984, “but from a personally selfish standpoint, I would prefer that he didn’t.”