Toyota Racing Development: No Longer a Stranger in a Strange Land

Burnt rubber, fuel fumes and Vino: Who could possibly turn down that kind of trifecta? The occasion gave us a chance to get an inside look at TRD’s racing brain trust of engineers, marketers and race teams as they wind up their West Coast swing before heading East for the remainder of the 2016 season.

Roots rocking

The roots of stock car racing started in the backroads of Appalachia where moonshiners making illegal whiskey during prohibition times would modify their cars to outrun those of “revenuers” employed by the State and Federal authorities who would seize and destroy bootlegging stills. It has evolved into a high-tech racing industry with wind tunnels, laser scanners, clean rooms and cad-cam design.

Toyota is the newest participant in the game, which is now a multi-billion dollar vehicle combining technology, sport, and entertainment. Toyota actively supports four cars with Joe Gibbs Racing, the team founded by former Washington Redskin’s NFL football coach Joe Gibbs. Coach Gibbs was raised in the car culture of California, where he drag raced while growing up. Denny Hamlin, Carl Edwards, Kyle Busch, and Matt Kenseth pilot NASCAR Camrys for Gibbs, while Martin Truex Jr. drives a Camry for the privateer Furniture Row Racing team.

Rolling chassis

NASCAR drivers operate on everything from small half-mile “bullpen” style tracks to road courses and large 2.5-mile high-banked superspeedways with sustained lap speeds over 200 mph. Each type of track requires a different type of racecar build, with the larger teams having as many as 15 different rolling chassis in stock at any time. A team will carry two cars per driver to the track each race weekend.

The cars are rebuilt after each race, and typically last 2-3 races. Damaged parts are removed and replaced or repaired as needed. A car is typically retired at the point there is damage to the chassis that compromises its safety. At that point, it usually shows up on the show car circuit or as a practice car, where crew members rehearse their pit stop duties. Finally, those vehicles that are beyond repair are sent to a recycling facility, where the car is destroyed under the watchful eyes of a Gibbs official, to prevent other teams from learning any secrets unique to that team. Although nearly every trick has been copied a dozen times, and with so many people involved in the sport, not to mention those in peripheral businesses, industrial espionage runs rampant in a company town.

Office of the President

Dave Wilson is the President and General Manager of Toyota Racing Development (TRD), the racing division of Toyota Motor Sales in the U.S. In that capacity, he is responsible for engine and chassis engineering, manufacturing, team testing and race support. We found him hanging with his staff of engineers in a posh rock and roll type tour bus. But it would be unfair to think he lives that type of life.

“NASCAR is Toyota’s largest commitment, but we are engaged in NHRA Drag Racing, Off-Road racing, Open Wheel USAC Sprint Cars, a little bit of everything,” he started. What differentiates Toyota’s model from its competitors is that they directly participate, getting their hands dirty in the process. “We like having skin in the game, and it’s a lot of pressure. Our team partners can’t go racing without us, but that’s okay because we can’t go racing without them,” he stated. Part of the corporate philosophy is that unlike other divisions of Toyota (worldwide), who will actually own the teams, TRD prefers to integrate themselves with teams rather than own them.

TRD has two facilities on opposite coasts. The Engine Engineering & Manufacturing site is located in So Cal, where 180 team members design, develop and build racing engines under one roof. They have the ability to do a clean-sheet design of any racing engine possible. That was a necessity because twelve years ago when Toyota got into this circus, the company did not manufacture a pushrod-style eight-cylinder engine for any of their cars that could be adapted to NASCAR racing use. The result of that effort is a 358-cubic inch mission-critical V8 that puts out between 600 and 700 horsepower depending on a particular racetrack.

They have specialized chassis development tools at the TRD Chassis and Team Support facility in North Carolina, with 50 team members from Charlotte who travel on the road with the race teams to help them with trackside adjustments. Wilson explained, “The rationale in doing that started with our entry into the sport, which 10-15 years ago was rather polarizing. Many people didn’t believe Toyota was fully committed. Part of what we wanted to do was demonstrate our commitment by hiring engineers from the local racing community. Using this approach, which was very much like an act of social responsibility, we were able to show the manner in which we wanted to participate in this sport.”

“From a practical standpoint, we have aerodynamicists, vehicle simulation engineers and so on. We have a neat tool, a full-scale vehicle simulator that we have recently gone public with. It was developed during our years in Formula 1 racing. We have actually scanned into the system, the racetracks we go to, with all their bumps and imperfections, and it allows our drivers to do familiarization testing and allows the teams to do setups and testing before the cars ever get to the racetrack,” said Wilson. The system is so comprehensive that engineers from the Toyota Tech Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan send Avalon and Camry street cars to perform Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH) testing.

“One of our favorite stories, was back in 2011, when we came to Sonoma with a young driver named Joey Logano. Joey had never turned a lap on Sonoma Raceway before, but he was able to put his Toyota on the pole. The only reason he was able to do that was through our simulator and the hundreds of laps he turned on it before he actually got here. All the other manufacturers have it now, and our colleagues in Japan have asked us to help them develop a similar piece for production car development.”

“NASCAR gave us this inch-thick rulebook and said here’s what your competition is doing. One of the unique things about the sport is if we make something, we have to be able to sell it to any team in the series, and the first customers to line up are your competitors. They buy them, cut them up and examine them,” said Wilson. Even the garages at Sonoma Raceway are very tight, where racecars are stored about 36 inches apart from each other. So it’s a certainty that engineers from all the teams are checking out the other teams while in the garage, just to see what the competition is doing. NASCAR intentionally designed the series that way to maintain a level of parity throughout. “It keeps everyone on their toes, that’s for certain,” said Wilson.

“We can use our intellectual property to try to gain an advantage. If this was a spec series where everything had to be identical, we wouldn’t be interested in participating because we want to learn something by doing it. NASCAR has created an environment where their stakeholders (Toyota, Ford and Chevrolet) can get their hands dirty yet maintain a reasonable level of parity. It’s no easy feat. NASCAR sets measurements for weights and such but we do have latitude to work “within the box.” As long as we remain inside that, we’re ok. Anytime we try to make a change, NASCAR is actively engaged to keep costs at an even keel so one manufacturer doesn’t have to increase their spending just to keep up. In other words, innovations like the Dodge Daytona Charger are relegated to the history books.

Toyota leverages its participation at races to engage fans in their PitPass display area to show what the company is bringing to the showroom. There’s messaging that reinforces the fact that Toyota has four major manufacturing plants in the U.S., along with their R&D and Engineering facilities. There’s even a Camry “morph-car” that offers a side-by-side comparison of the differences- and similarities between a street and race Camry.

Then there’s the TRD brand equity. “In the past, where it was sufficient to slap a sticker and special set of floor mats on the vehicle, we have a commitment to this day, that if there is a TRD sticker on a vehicle, there will also be a performance upgrade,” said Wilson. “The trucks will have a heavy-duty suspension, while the powertrains will have performance intakes and exhausts. In the past we had a huge supercharger business where we sold thousands of them. Regulatory restraints have prevented that from continuing.”

But now there are more pressing priorities like diversifying the sport, and engaging new, younger fans to the show, because at the end of the day, NASCAR is an entertainment business. Getting eyeballs in front of the television is job one. Wilson states matter of factly, “It is a very popular sport but if you are not working on Millennials today, in ten years, all your fans will be dead.”

And then there is the concept of “Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday.”

“If you look at Sprint Cup cars today, you can see a Camry within that racecar. Before the current Generation Six racecar, the only way you could tell what brand it is was by the decals on the front. “We called that sticker engineering,” said Wilson. “From an appearance standpoint, stylists who design the production Camry help us to design the racecars as well, because we genuinely want our racecars to resemble a street Camry. The stylists get some time working on this side of the business, and they can take that experience back and learn from it.”

“So in other words, racing does improve the breed. There’s real value here that we are able to transfer to our colleagues on a global basis.”