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February 22, 2007

	Dale Jarrett may have been the lone bright spot in a debut Daytona 500 performance Toyota would probably rather forget. AP

Whenever you’re the new kid in town, the last thing you want to do is ruffle any feathers your first day of school. At least, that’s how I always approached it; you learn the ropes, you try and slither through unscathed and adjust in a brave new world in which you’re trying to find your place.

Guess Toyota isn’t that type of kid.

Cheating. Penalties. DNQs. Wrecks. One race in the books, and Toyota’s already been sent to NASCAR’s version of the principal’s office twice, once before the race and once during it.

As the smoke cleared on a wild Daytona 500, it revealed not one car among the Top 20 finishers was driving a Toyota. Dale Jarrett was the highest placing driver in a Camry, coming home 22nd, while none of the others wound up better than 30th. Two drivers failed to finish, one for being parked by NASCAR for aggressive driving, while four other Toyotas played hooky on their first day of schools because they didn’t make the race. Things were so bad for the Camrys, one of their drivers actually heads to California with negative points; Waltrip stands at – 27 after being busted in what is rapidly becoming one of the more infamous cheating scandals in NASCAR’s history.

Ouch.

“This is a week we’d looked forward to for many years,” said TRD’s vice president for racing development Jim Aust when Waltrip was busted last Thursday. “To begin this way certainly takes much of the happiness and limelight out of it.”

After the race, though, Toyota’s talking heads were quickly changing their tone from melancholy to optimistic, putting on as much makeup as possible to hide the fact they were coming home with a black eye.

“We were hoping for somebody to turn up in the top 15,” said TRD Senior Vice President Lee White. “When the wrecks started happening with 25 laps to go, we really thought it might work out that way. But we got three (drivers finishing) in the top 35, so if they can just continue on with that for the next four races, then maybe we can get some guys that will be in those guaranteed positions.”

“We’ll carry on to Fontana next week, keep on working and we’ll be OK.”

The NASCAR schedule doesn’t stop long enough for anyone to sit there and lick their wounds. So, onto Fontana the Camrys march, with those top 35 “locked in” spots continuing to serve as their biggest hurdle to overcome.

While the entry list is trimmed down for the second event of the season, it still stands at 53 cars. With only two Toyotas locked into the field, the other five cars could easily end up missing the race. For drivers Jeremy Mayfield, Brian Vickers and A.J. Allmendinger, making this 43-car field is critical; they already have one DNQ under their belt, and a second miss would be devastating to the rest of their season.

For those three drivers and Waltrip, there’s precedent that proves a team can recover from such a substandard performance. Scott Riggs left Daytona with zero points last year after failing to qualify for the race in the No. 10 car. Coming back strong to qualify in the next four events, he slithered into the top 35 in owner points anyway, locking in a spot for qualifying and allowing his team to focus on race setup throughout the season. By the end of the year, he had actually slipped into the top 20 in driver points.

But Riggs never had to deal with the dark cloud of cheating, and Waltrip’s scandal will continue to cast a shadow over all the Toyota teams for the foreseeable future. This week, NASCAR is prepared to announce the illegal substance they found in Waltrip’s intake manifold, keeping Toyota in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

The scrutiny won’t ease this weekend in California, where the teams will be under the microscope from their own big bosses more than ever, as Toyota Motor Sales is based in nearby Torrance. While the other Big Three manufacturers in NASCAR look to Michigan as the race where all the executives will be watching, for Toyota it will be this weekend, when the “suits” show up to judge the progress in just the second race of the season.

“We’re going to have some executives at the race, but like Daytona, it’s another race and there are 34 more this year and hundreds more that we will be competing in over the next several years,” said Aust. “I think everyone understands the mountain we have to climb, and the thing that we’ve said is that the most important thing is for everyone to keep improving.”

Moving forward, those improvements are going to have to happen quickly for the Camrys to make any type of splash in Nextel Cup the first part of this season. First impressions take a long time to change.