Toyota 'frustrated' through first quarter of Cup season (cont'd)

Blaney has the marque's best qualifying run, seventh at Bristol. He's qualified in the top 15 five times in nine starts, but also has one DNQ.

But besides Blaney, Toyota's other six full-time teams total only five top-20 starts between them.

Borland let go as crew chief for Jarrett

More personnel changes at Michael Waltrip Racing as Matt Borland was let go as Dale Jarrett's crew chief after the race at Talladega.

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And the results column is far worse. The 33 starts Toyota drivers made in the first nine races resulted in one top-10 finish and two others between 11th and 20th.

Less than mediocre performance is also underscored by inconsistency. Vickers' No. 83 Team Red Bull outfit has all three top finishes, but the team has failed to make six of 10 races.

Waltrip did well to make the season-opening Daytona 500 on the heels of a debilitating set of penalties for a cheating infraction before Bud Pole Qualifying.

But since then Waltrip is on a string of nine consecutive DNQs, and the fact that many of them have been by infinitesimal margins doesn't matter. He's still one-for-10.

Jarrett had a string of 424 consecutive starts broken Friday when he failed to make the Crown Royal presents the Jim Stewart 400. It was the first race in which Jarrett has lacked the safety net of a past champion's provisional starting position.

In the first nine races, he qualified on speed twice, using a champion's provisional six times -- his allotment for the entire season -- and per the rulebook as a past champion when qualifying was rained out at Texas.

At Richmond, Burdett, who was named his crew chief Thursday, was not present, when the team decided to keep Burdett at the shop to prepare a new chassis that's a cooperative effort between MWR and TRD.

"Maybe I'm not giving these crew chiefs the information that they need [but] we have to have that supporting group to make any of them good," Jarrett said. "Just like I'm no better than the cars I'm in or Jeff Gordon's no better than the cars he's driving -- and it wasn't too long ago that he was almost written off.

"The thing is we have to do some things here and make some moves to make our organization better as a whole. This isn't just about [my] car -- it's about the entire Michael Waltrip Racing organization and trying to strengthen it [because] we have a lot of good people and are trying to get everyone situated.

"It was easy to sit down last August, September and October and say 'This is going to take time for all this to happen.' That sounded really good. We are competitors and we want it to happen now [but] the fact is that it's not going to happen right now.

"We're racing against organizations that have been out here for a long time who have a solid foundation, and we're trying to make that happen and get that done. It's more difficult than what you can imagine -- it's probably more difficult than I imagined.

"Sometimes, you have to take a step back before you can move forward and I think that's what we're trying to do."

Jarrett went so far, Friday afternoon, to admit that he understood that his team might miss some races this summer.

"I sat down with Jason yesterday and he said 'Fridays have become my worst day because there is a possibility of missing the race,'" Jarrett said. "This isn't about a race-to-race case. Do we want to make every race? Certainly. This is about getting to be a good organization with three good race teams and three good racecars by the time we get to the last 10 races this season.

"If we don't accomplish that then we're going to be in trouble for 2008. The hard facts are that we have a lot of work to do." (Continued)