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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — There was the victory at Indianapolis Motor Speedway last season, the no longer lame Kyle Busch winning the Brickyard 400.
And the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship that followed at season’s end, once again courtesy of Busch and the Joe Gibbs Racing organization.
Another milestone was reached here Sunday as Denny Hamlin, also of JGR, made a last-lap pass of teammate Matt Kenseth to capture the season-opening Daytona 500.
Toyota. Toyota. And Toyota.
A first Brickyard title; a first Sprint Cup title; and now a first Daytona 500 title.
An automaker that admittedly struggled to find its footing when debuting in the Sprint Cup Series a decade ago suddenly is running out of accomplishments to cross off the list.
Not so fast, cautions David Wilson, President & General Manager, Toyota Racing Development, USA.
“I don’t think you ever stop checking the boxes,” Wilson said. “But today, the Daytona 500, the ‘Great American Race’ was the only race that Toyota had not won.
“We’re going to take a few hours to try and soak this in and live in the moment. But then it’s back to work tomorrow because we’ve got another season to start. This is the plate race, and now we go to Atlanta where we’ve got to run our new open stuff and see how we stack up.”
It was a significant victory for Toyota, which backs the four-team JGR effort (Busch, Hamlin, Matt Kenseth and Carl Edwards) and the single-car unit of Furniture Row Racing. Bigger than the Indianapolis 500 victory scored by Gil de Ferran in 2003 in a Team Penske entry powered by the automaker, according to Wilson.
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“This is very difficult for me to put in words,” he said. “I cannot articulate adequately what this means to Toyota. I’ll start by saying it’s our single biggest race in our company’s history. I’ll put it in front of the Indy 500, which was a pretty special one back in 2003.”
Toyota not only won the race, the first of 36 points races for the Sprint Cup Series this season, but its teams took four of the top five spots. For much of the race, those teams ran either 1-2-3 or 1-2-3-4. It was that kind of day.
Hamlin, Kenseth, Busch and Truex combined to lead 156 of the race’s 200 laps.
Until someone comes along to top it, history will show that the closest finish in Daytona 500 history featured a pair of Toyota Camrys crossing the finish line side-by-side.
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It was a far cry from 2007, when Toyota teams rolled out for the first time in a Sprint Cup event here. Of the eight teams carrying the nameplate in that year’s race, only four managed to qualify and none finished higher than 22nd.
Wilson called that debut “incredibly humbling.”
“But we didn’t expect to succeed either,” he said. “Obviously … when we started Cup racing, the fans were apprehensive. I think it was a polarizing issue, Toyota being here in the sport. I think our struggles — it so much humanized us and showed everybody that we’re going to have to work as hard as anybody.
“Nothing comes easy. The level of competition that this sport has amongst the teams and engineers is unlike anything we’ve ever seen, including CART and IndyCar.”
Sunday, the hard work and the long hours and the team alignments and everything else that you see and much of that which you don’t finally came together.
It came together for Hamlin, for Joe Gibbs Racing and for Toyota.
Another milestone achieved, another box checked.