A pride of Toyotas qualified near the front at the second race of the season in Atlanta.

From the June 2004 Issue of Car and Driver

Race-car impresario Jack Roush, when asked about Toyota's being invited to join NASCAR, said the U.S. would be better off if stock-car racing remained all-American. "When the Japanese go racing, it's like going to war," he was quoted as saying. Jimmy Spencer, NASCAR's Yankee redneck, wasn't afraid to snarl publicly about the "SOBs" who bombed Pearl Harbor, and expressed hope that "Ford, Chevrolet, and Dodge kick their ass." And when Dodge found out one of its stock-car owners, Bill Davis, was lending Toyota's NASCAR effort a hand, it terminated his contract and sued him.

But the stunning impact of the Japanese automaker's arrival in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series in 2004 is perhaps best exemplified by the red, white, and blue reaction of Detroit's automakers.

Chevy, which had offered scant truck support in the past, despite having the most trucks (about 17 of some 40 trucks in the series), is suddenly fielding four factory trucks in 2004. Three of those are also sponsored by GM—fully paid for out of the home office's budget. It has created a research and development team dedicated solely to trucks, offered its teams more wind-tunnel testing time, and hired a shock-absorber engineer, among other upgrades.

Ford, whose F-series trucks have been the top-selling motor vehicles in the U.S. for 22 consecutive years, has convinced Roush and Robert Yates to pool their engine-building resources for the good of all Fords. The corporation is also working more closely and sharing more information with its teams.

As for Dodge's commitment, lead driver Bobby Hamilton cites "my 19 wind-tunnel dates last year" as evidence of the company's determination about truck racing and says it would be "hard to get any more support."

And despite Spencer's testy recollection of a war that ended a dozen years before he was born, the folks at Toyota had to begin feeling right at home in the France family's oval empire the moment the cheatin' allegations started to fly, which happened at the truck season's second event at Atlanta Motor Speedway in March.

After qualifying third, Ford driver Carl Edwards of Roush Racing found himself sandwiched between Toyota Tundras like a Double Stuf Oreo. In only their second race, the Toyotas had qualified first, second, fourth, and fifth.

"When you see them win four of the top five spots—to me, that's a little bit hard to take," Edwards says. "But I'm sure, though, NASCAR is looking at it."

In today's NASCAR, this type of complaint is not so much an accusation of cheating as it is an allegation that one truckmaker has an unfair advantage over the others, usually in horsepower or aerodynamics.

"I'm just saying that NASCAR needs to do what they've always done—just make sure that everybody is in the same neighborhood as far as horsepower and drag and things like that," Edwards says. "Because as the year goes on, they're going to get better. So that's scary to us guys who aren't driving Toyotas."

Says former NASCAR chairman Bill France Jr.: "We'll make sure they play by the same rules that everybody else is playing by. They haven't stuck out anywhere yet."

In fact, Toyota has stuck out in one very visible way: control. Unlike most manufacturers, which contribute money, sheetmetal, and parts but let the teams do everything else, Toyota controls all the preparation. It builds all of its trucks from scratch. (Of course, the irony here is that NASCAR trucks aren't trucks at all, but truck-shaped bodies on race-car chassis.) In a trait that says much about the national character of Japan, Toyota builds and maintains all its engines— Hands off, crew chiefs!—and handles just about everything except hiring drivers and choosing the springs and shocks at the racetrack.

"We allow the teams some individuality in choosing the type of truck [i.e., chassis and suspension design], but they are, in fact, gravitating to our 100-percent-recommended truck," says Lee White, vice-president and general manager of Toyota Racing Development (TRD).

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