Yeley built his early reputation in USAC open-wheel racing, winning the 1997 Indiana Sprintweek and earning Rookie of the Year in the USAC National Sprint Car Series. He made four Indy Racing League starts including the 1998 Indianapolis 500, where he finished ninth after a first-lap spin that nearly collected race winner Eddie Cheever Jr.
His defining open-wheel achievement came in 2003, when he won championships in all three of USAC's top divisions — the National Sprint Car, Silver Crown, and National Midget series — in a single season. That made him only the second driver after Tony Stewart (1995) to win the USAC Triple Crown in one year. Yeley also set a record with 24 USAC wins that season, surpassing the previous mark of nineteen set by A.J. Foyt in 1961. Stewart owned the Sprint and Silver Crown cars Yeley drove to those titles. A broken neck sustained in a 2009 USAC crash interrupted his occasional open-wheel activities.
Following the same path that Tony Stewart had taken from USAC to JGR, Yeley joined Joe Gibbs Racing in 2004. He drove in the Busch Series part-time in 2004 and full-time in 2005, finishing eleventh in the championship with twelve top-tens. After the departure of Jason Leffler, Yeley was named to drive the No. 18 Interstate Batteries Chevrolet in the Nextel Cup full-time for 2006.
His best Cup season with JGR was 2007, when he scored a career-high second-place finish at the Coca-Cola 600 on a fuel strategy gamble and took his first Cup pole at Michigan, beating Jimmie Johnson by one-thousandth of a second. However, despite racing for a top-tier organization, Yeley finished a disappointing 29th in the 2006 standings and was released by Gibbs after 2007 when the team signed Kyle Busch for the No. 18.
After leaving JGR, Yeley moved to Hall of Fame Racing for 2008 and was released mid-season. He joined the Camping World Truck Series in 2009 and was pressed into substitute Cup duty for the suspended Jeremy Mayfield. Over the following decade, Yeley cycled through numerous small teams including Whitney Motorsports, Tommy Baldwin Racing, BK Racing, TriStar Motorsports, NY Racing Team, and Rick Ware Racing, rarely holding a ride for more than one season at a time.
Notable results in his post-JGR years included a tenth-place finish in the 2013 Daytona 500 for Tommy Baldwin Racing — his first top-ten since 2008 — a seventh-place TriStar finish at Iowa in 2017 (the week after team owner Mark Smith's death), an eleventh at Talladega in 2023, and a seventh at Atlanta in 2023 in a rain-shortened race.
Yeley holds the NASCAR record for the most starts across all three of the sport's top divisions — Cup, Xfinity, and Trucks — without ever winning a race in any of them. Despite spending years competing in the series, his considerable open-wheel credentials never translated into victory lane in stock car racing at the national level.
Yeley represents a singular intersection of accomplishment and frustration in motorsport. His USAC Triple Crown places him in the company of Pancho Carter, Tony Stewart, Dave Darland, Jerry Coons Jr., Tracy Hines, and Logan Seavey. Yet in NASCAR, where his USAC achievements earned him a factory-team opportunity, he never found the combination of equipment quality and fortune necessary to win. His long career as a journeyman nonetheless demonstrated his ability to adapt and continue competing across multiple NASCAR series well into his forties.