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FORT WORTH, Texas — Toyota officials are disappointed but not distraught now that the opportunity to put four of the automaker’s cars in the Championship 4 round of the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup has come to an end.
“We kidded about it; it was mathematically possible up until Sunday afternoon (at Martinsville),” David Wilson, President and general manager, Toyota Racing Development, USA, told NASCAR.com Friday at Texas Motor Speedway. “But I don’t think any of us really thought that with the likes of Jimmie Johnson, Kevin Harvick, Joey Logano (still in contention), you know, that it was real.”
Joe Gibbs Racing is Toyota’s flagship organization in NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series, and its drivers won 11 times leading up to the start of the Chase. All four drivers — Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards, Denny Hamlin and Matt Kenseth — have advanced into the Round of 8 in spite of failing to win a Chase race this season.
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Martin Truex Jr., whose Furniture Row Racing team enjoys a technical alliance with JGR, won four times, including twice in the opening round of the Chase. But the title hopes of Truex and the No. 78 team soured when an engine did the same in the second round at Talladega.
Jimmie Johnson‘s victory at Martinsville last week guaranteed that there would be no Toyota sweep when it comes to the title-determining Ford EcoBoost 400, scheduled for Sunday, Nov. 20 at Homestead-Miami Speedway. The six-time series champion and driver of the No. 48 Chevrolet for Hendrick Motorsports is advancing to the final round for the first time under the elimination-style Chase format.
Three positions are still up for grabs, with only Sunday’s AAA Texas 500 (2 p.m. ET, NBC, PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR) and next weekend’s stop at Phoenix remaining. Hamlin (second in points), Kenseth (third) and Busch (fourth) escaped Martinsville without incident but also without a final-round guarantee.
“We led 374 out of 500 laps at Martinsville,” Wilson said. “For any Toyota team not to come away with a win, that was crushingly disappointing.
“The silver lining is we led 374 out of 500 laps. It wasn’t for a lack of speed.”
NASCAR’s latest Chase format has ensured that victory equals advancement into the next round. And it’s produced manufacturer parity, to a degree. All three groups, Chevrolet, Ford and Toyota, were represented in the 2014 Chase, the first season of the elimination-style format. Last year, only Ford missed putting a team in the final. And this year’s Round of 8 features the aforementioned four Toyota teams from JGR, three Chevrolet-branded teams and one from Ford.
The JGR accomplishment, Wilson said, “is just incredible.”
“I don’t know the next time that that, realistically, will happen, can happen,” he said. “Certainly we’re all proud of that.
“Now, having said that, that was arguably … Martin Truex’s engine failure at Talladega allowed that to happen. Would he have finished where he probably was going to? …
“Obviously we hated to see that happen. … To have two drivers like Martin Truex Jr. and Brad Keselowski (Team Penske Ford), who accounted for eight wins between them, for neither of them to have a chance to fight for a championship? That’s hard to swallow.
“And to come via a mechanical (issue), completely out of their control, no fault of their own? I hate it. I hate it from our perspective. But having said that, that’s the Chase. That happened to Jimmie Johnson just last year and here he’s going to Miami.
“You accept it and you try not to dwell on it. Try and focus out front.”
The lack of victories by JGR thus far in the Chase hasn’t been a concern, he said, because there have been opportunities for victories that just didn’t pan out. Performance has been strong.
“There’s not been a race,” Wilson said, “where we’ve said, ‘Man, we just sucked’ and we had no chance to win. The fact is, we’ve had the performance to put ourselves in position to win.”
What furor there was concerning the run-in-the-back ploy at Talladega, ensuring that three of the four JGR teams advanced into the Round of 8, has died down, and Wilson said the decision was never an issue.
It was “polarizing” among fans but not among Toyota officials who saw it as a game plan executed flawlessly.
“Here’s where I have a lot of faith, we’re all talking about it,” he said. “It’s kind of a conundrum based upon this format. Are there tweaks that NASCAR can make to relieve that awkwardness, to put a higher reward on finishing positions? … Right now I don’t know that anybody has the ‘Aha! This is what we need to do.’
“That’s the first time that we’ve really seen a multi-car strategy like that. … What they did isn’t new. What’s new is they did it in concert with their teammates and did it with a bigger picture in mind.”