Toyota 'frustrated' through first quarter of Cup season

RICHMOND, Va. -- If you think Toyota's Nextel Cup Series teams are frustrated by their performance in the first quarter of the season, you'd be correct. But it's nothing compared to how the manufacturer feels.

"It's frustrating that people have difficulty learning from history -- but I'm not the first guy to say that," said Lee White, senior vice president of Toyota Racing Development (TRD). "You can only go by results, in which case [the first quarter grade] is not very good."

White's assessment is based on the past three seasons for the Toyota Tundra in the Craftsman Truck Series. Toyota entered the Truck Series in 2004 and, since gaining its first victory in July 2004, has scored 29 wins in less than four seasons and last year won the drivers' and manufacturers' championships.

To do that, Toyota has exercised a "one manufacturer / one team" approach with all its organizations, to good effect.

But last fall at the Homestead-Miami Speedway finale, White expressed concern over Toyota's Nextel Cup teams' ability to exercise the same level of cooperation.

An exclamation point to the current feeling in the Toyota camp, which certainly doesn't reflect the aura of one of the car builder's former ad campaigns, came when Wyler Racing, a leading Craftsman Truck Series program that won the Daytona season opener with Jack Sprague, built a Car of Tomorrow, tested it extensively and came to its first Cup show and succeeded Friday.

Former Cup winner Johnny Benson, whose last Cup start came in a Bill Davis Racing Dodge in October 2005, put the Wylers' car into the field in 31st.

"They're one of our truck teams that work very well with us, within our system," White said. "And we're still trying to develop that system within our Cup teams. So maybe in that regard there's a message here: This is how we work, you know?"

For Toyota in Nextel Cup, the systems the teams have in place, independent of the manufacturer, are hardly working.

Nine races into 2007, White's fears about a lack of inter-team cooperation are fully realized; though he did admit "it took us a year and a half to get the truck teams to do it, at that level. It may take us two years to get that level of cooperation at the Cup level."

Toyota won four Truck races in 2004 and has won four of five this season. Over the last two seasons Toyota has won 53 percent of the Truck races.

"So far it hasn't worked in Cup -- it doesn't," White said. "And the reason for that is the elevated level of investment, there's much more money at stake, there's bigger exposure, bigger egos and the fact that every team is competing with each other for that last spot." (Continued)