In adding Gibbs, Toyota traces a path to its past

It all seemed like such an overreaction. With all the subtlety of a stock car slamming into a concrete wall at 200 mph, Jack Roush declared war on Toyota when NASCAR's preseason media tour made a stop at his metro Charlotte shop. Nextel Cup's newest manufacturer, he warned, was going to throw dollars around like confetti, lure everybody else's best people with bloated paychecks, and fundamentally change the way its competitors do business. You almost expected him to swap his trademark Fedora for a combat helmet, grab an M-16 rifle, and bunker down in a foxhole, waiting for the siege.

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He's still waiting, along with everyone else. To call Toyota's debut season in Nextel Cup underwhelming would be kind. For all those millions it's spent to break into NASCAR's top level, the world's largest carmaker has exactly one pole position, seven top-10 finishes and a whole lot of trips home on Friday afternoon. One of its member organizations (Michael Waltrip Racing) began the year mired in scandal, while another (Team Red Bull) has already cut loose its architect. If Roush truly is at war with Toyota, then his opponent has yet to fire the first shot.

Until Wednesday, when the real Toyota -- the one that's dominated both major North American open-wheel series, the one that had executives at cash-strapped domestic manufacturers quivering at the Japanese carmaker's foray into Nextel Cup -- finally arrived. The alliance announced Wednesday with Joe Gibbs Racing (watch video), three times a champion in NASCAR's premier series, means the end of the soft, somewhat hapless Toyota we've known for much of this season. That was but an illusion. The real Toyota has teeth. It wins races and championships. It's the reason other teams have been scrambling to find business partners, rushing to gird themselves with cash.

We know this because Toyota entered open-wheel racing the same way, quietly at first, before leaving with a case full of trophies and in search of new lands to conquer. We know this because Toyota broke into the old CART series a decade ago with organizations that didn't scare anybody, eventually aligned with those that did, and never looked back. In adding Joe Gibbs Racing to its NASCAR stable, Toyota is doing the same thing it did when it paired with Chip Ganassi's juggernaut Champ Car operation eight years ago -- laying the cornerstone for the kind of success its rivals have always feared.

But first came the same sort of transitional struggles the manufacturer is dealing with now in NASCAR. Toyota entered CART racing in 1996 with the team owned by driving legend Dan Gurney, whose organization had enjoyed some sports car success under the Toyota banner, but used an inferior chassis in Champ Car and was completely overmatched. It also joined forces with the team owned by Cal Wells, who helped design the manufacturer's racing engine, a fact that didn't prevent his organization from going winless on the circuit for five years.

With drivers like P.J. Jones, Hiro Matsushita and Juan Manuel Fangio II -- nephew of the five-time Formula One champion -- Toyota was hardly a force. The manufacturer was rarely a challenger for race victories, and never for the championship. That all changed in 2000, when Toyota added Ganassi, whose team had won the previous four CART titles. Gurney's operation was jettisoned. And Toyota cars suddenly began to win.

Juan Montoya won races at Milwaukee and Michigan -- he won the Indianapolis 500 as well, but had to use a different engine to adhere to Indy Racing League rules -- and finished ninth in the driver standings, with teammate Jimmy Vasser in sixth. Even Wells' team scraped out a victory at Chicago with Cristiano da Matta, before Toyota followed the diminutive Brazilian driver to the more powerful Newman-Haas team. The manufacturer also added a solid PacWest organization which produced an engineer named Matt Borland, who would go on to become a winning crew chief in NASCAR.

The moves paid off. Toyota won six times in 2001. In 2002, it won 10 races and the championship with da Matta. The next year the manufacturer moved into the Indy Racing League, where its partnership with Roger Penske and Indianapolis 500 triumph with Gil de Ferran were the linchpins of a season that saw Toyota win 11 of 16 starts. The carmaker added another series title, this one with Ganassi driver Scott Dixon, and firmly established itself as the standard by which all others were compared.

Will that pattern develop in NASCAR as quickly as it did in the open-wheel ranks? It's unlikely; in Nextel Cup, Toyota faces fields that are larger, a schedule that is more grueling, competition that is tougher and rules that are far more stringent. But the addition of Gibbs is a breakthrough move, and a direct parallel to the one it made with Ganassi so many years ago. Now, the manufacturer will be a direct threat to win. When it does -- and there are no ifs about it anymore -- other teams and drivers will notice.

Because regardless of the xenophobia that may grip a certain segment of the NASCAR fan base at the mention of Toyota's name, drivers just want to win. From their perspective, the vehicles are all the same, identical metal tubes with different engines and a different sticker on the front. The Car of Tomorrow, which returns for Saturday's race at Richmond and goes full time next season, only reinforces that uniformity. Get used to it, boys and girls -- you're going to see Tony Stewart, the pride of middle America, in a Camry. The more success he and his teammates enjoy, the more will follow.

Wednesday is the beginning -- of Toyota's rise to major player in NASCAR, of the boldest move any Nextel Cup championship contender has made in some time, and of the war Jack Roush knew was coming all along.

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.

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