| Will Toyota Win in Nextel Cup? | | Date Created: Jan 26, 2006, 12:57 PM |
Still trying to get my brain around all of the Toyota deals announced this week. While working with a multitude of race teams (large and small, good and bad) as a part of the Mercedes-Benz CART program in the late 1990s, one of the biggest lessons I learned: the key to a manufacturers' success is based largely upon the teams which they support. Yes, there are other factors, but the best teams are always at the top of any manfacturer's wish list. In NASCAR, the same holds true as the two top programs -Hendrick and Roush - carry the Chevy and Ford banner to battle every week.
So, who or what is missing from Toyota's announcements this week? A proven team and drivers that have consistently won races on the Cup level. No offense to those already announced, but each comes to the Cup level with inexperience and/or many unknown elements. Will this change? It will be interesting to see what happens in the next 9-18 months.
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 Despite these short-term concerns, this similar long-term blueprint has worked for Toyota before. Their foray into CART racing began in 1996 with Dan Gurney's All-American Racers, a team with a great heritage, but small and undersized in the scheme of the series at that time. (Not to mention the added struggle of simultaneously developing their own beautiful but never truly competitive Eagle chassis.) Toyota's other partner at that time was PPI Racing - the same Cal Wells team that has run the Tide machine in Cup for several years. (Wells' team suffered a major setback when their chosen golden boy, Jeff Krosnoff, was killed in a horrific accident in Toronto in 1996. Wells' open-wheel efforts never seemed to fully recover from that terrible day.)
The Toyota program struggled mightily before finally getting a victory in 2000 with Chip Ganssi's Target team and a talented young driver named Juan Pablo-Montoya. Toyota eventually won the manufacturers title in 2002, six years after their debut.
Will they be as methodical and patient with the NASCAR program? It will be fascinating to watch. |
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