Toyota eyeing great leap forward in second season

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Lee White has a vision.

There's Dale Earnhardt Jr., leading a Hendrick Motorsports contingent including Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon into NASCAR's year-end Chase for the Sprint Cup. With them are three or four drivers from Roush Fenway Racing, although team owner Jack Roush has insisted that all five will get in. And there are three or four Toyotas, giving NASCAR's newest manufacturer a chance at what would certainly be a history-making first championship in the sport's premier division.

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"Let's pull the pin on that thing, and see how it works out in November," White, the senior vice president and general manager of Toyota Racing Development, said with a wry smile.

One year ago, such thoughts would have been dismissed as pure fantasy. Toyota entered its debut season in NASCAR's top division with only two cars locked into the Daytona 500, and plenty of trouble to come -- an illegal fuel scandal that rocked its flagship organization, engine power issues, and drivers who missed as many races as they made. Now, those days seem far, far away. There's a three-time championship team added to the stable. There are Camrys posting consistently fast times in the first session of testing at Daytona International Speedway. There's talk of winning the 50th Daytona 500, and challenging for the series crown.

Suddenly, this isn't the enfeebled Toyota organization that stumbled onto NASCAR's grandest stage last season. This is beginning to look like the one that's collected loads of trophies in open-wheel racing. The one that so spooked Roush, the Ford owner went out and found a business partner to raise more cash. The one White was referring to when he told reporters "look out for us in '08 and '09" at a media event two years ago.

"I think A.J. Allmendinger said it very well [Monday], when he said he was dead last in the test a year ago. [Monday], he was bouncing around the top-five all day with 40 cars, and good drivers and good teams out there," White said. "That itself makes a fairly strong statement about the progress since a year ago."

So do the speed charts as a whole. In Tuesday afternoon's first drafting session, new Toyota driver J.J. Yeley was first, with Kyle Busch third. In Tuesday morning's single-car session, Camrys posted eight of the top-12 speeds. Toyotas were also fast in the first two sessions Monday, no surprise to drivers who posted strong qualifying speeds in the first Car of Tomorrow restrictor-plate event at Talladega last October, even if several didn't make the race because of the top 35 rule.

"The horsepower of the Toyotas is phenomenal," Yeley said. "I think everybody already knew that after Talladega, where the engines were so strong. To me, the problem may lie during the season, and I know they've already remedied it, with the torque and making sure they had the low-end power on the mile-and-a-half and some of the small racetracks. I know that's something they've already addressed, and they've found a lot of things. That's been the benefit of having [Joe] Gibbs Racing as a part of Toyota. They've been able to help them in some areas they struggled in. All of the weaknesses, I think, have been eliminated." (Continued)