Toyota's emphasis lies far beyond Daytona

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Race winner Jack Sprague helped Toyota take four of the top-five spots in Friday night's Craftsman Truck Series event. Dave Blaney drove his Camry to a second-place finish Saturday in the carmaker's debut on the Busch circuit. NASCAR's newest manufacturer enjoyed quite a week at Daytona International Speedway.

Except for the Nextel Cup Series.

A Speedweeks that began with Toyota's flagship program facing cheating allegations ended Sunday, when Dale Jarrett's 22nd-place finish was the best among the four Camrys that made the Daytona 500 field. Blaney and David Reutimann finished well down the chart after getting caught up in accidents, while Michael Waltrip brought his scandal-plagued car home in 30th.

But afterward, as the crowd filed out of the giant frontstretch grandstand and night settled over the speedway, Toyota executives seemed anything but disappointed.

"Absolutely not," said Lee White, senior vice president of Toyota Racing Development. "I look at that as, OK, it is what it is, and we keep working on our stuff. This program for this year is going to be about constant improvement. It's a fundamental principal of our company, and we hope to go to Fontana and get a few more guys in the race, and go from there."

A restrictor-plate track like Daytona might not be the best place to judge the Camry's 2007 potential. NASCAR competes on the big venues only four times annually, and White said plate facilities haven't been Toyota's prime emphasis. The next two Nextel Cup tracks, 2-mile California and 1.5-mile Las Vegas, may prove a more accurate barometer.

"We're only going to race this car three more times, and we're done. Right now, we're not focused on this program, on current-car plate racing, at all," White said.

"What's gone into it so far to get here is not bad, if you look at the chassis dyno numbers that came back and everything. When the teams come back in July, and go to Talladega hopefully with a little more experience, they'll do a little bit better. But our focus is more on open-track mile-and-a-halfs with the current car, and the Car of Tomorrow is certainly important to us."

Besides, the bigger hurdle for Toyota in the next four weeks won't be finishing races, but starting them. Only Jarrett and Blaney are safe from missing events until Bristol, when 2007 points go into effect. Four Toyotas made the Daytona field, but four others -- including both entries from Team Red Bull -- went home early.

But White was pleased with the reliability of the Camry's two-month-old engine -- a misfire in Reutimann's Gatorade 150s car was the only hitch in the motor department -- and Jarrett saw promise in the vehicle itself.

"The car wasn't bad," he said. "There are a few areas that we'll work on. For our first race, not too bad. There was just stupid racing at the end. The green-white-checkers are terrible and tear up a bunch of stuff. We managed to come out of it unscathed, and get us a few points. That's what we have to do here for the first five or six weeks."

The highlight was Saturday' Busch race, where White said Toyota executives were "over the moon" with Blaney's runner-up finish. The lowlight was the expulsion of Waltrip's crew chief and competition director after NASCAR officials found an illegal substance in the manifold of the driver's primary car. NASCAR seized the vehicle, levied a $100,000 fine and a 100-point penalty, and placed crew chief David Hyder on indefinite suspension.

"We just have to bear down," Waltrip said. "We're going to try and persevere. We understand that we have it stacked up against us, but if we can go into California and run good down the road, we can put this behind us.

"The thing that I didn't want to do is damage the credibility of my team. I want people to believe that we plan on playing by the rules. I can earn the money back and earn the points back. I just don't want to lose the integrity that people have put into my organization."

From the speeds during preseason testing to Daytona 500 qualifying to the results of Sunday's race, Toyota's all-around performance thus far in 2007 lends credence to the theory that it will take some time for the manufacturer to arrive as a serious contender on NASCAR's top circuit. But White believes it may also quiet some of the clamoring from rivals about Toyota's perceived financial advantage, and the exorbitant sums of money some think it's spending on the sport.

"All the angst and anxiety and stressing over us buying our way into the race and taking over the thing, obviously was a whole bunch of hooey," he said. "It didn't happen, and it isn't going to happen. We're a company that's all about paying our dues and working hard."