Toyota Nextel Cup Cars - Pressing The Throttle

White says that premise is flawed. Davis shared no secrets because there were none to share, he says. NASCAR requires its manufacturers to make its parts available to the public. White acknowledges that when TRD began designing its NASCAR V-8, the company bought samples of what Ford, Chevrolet, and Dodge were already running.

"NASCAR told us to 'look in the garage' and see what other people were building," he says. "So we went to the garage and bought samples. We bought one of everything. We put the three engines side by side and took the best design features of each one of them."

What Toyota ended up with is a melding of existing technology and some of its own improvements.

Toyota faced some unusual challenges in building the NASCAR V-8.

"No one at Toyota had ever designed anything like that," he says.

TRD hired a consultant from Scotland and sent him around the globe to find a manufacturing facility that could cast the iron V-8 pushrod-valvetrain engine blocks.

White says TRD didn't have a completed race engine fired up until November 2003, just three months before Toyota's debut at the '04 Daytona Speedweeks.

The first Toyota chassis for the Craftsman Truck Series was essentially a Ford F-150 with a different nose.

"Everything has to fit inside the templates," he says.

The off-the-shelf nature of the NASCAR package is in sharp contrast to when Toyota was involved in the open-wheel Champ Car Series. In that era, every part of TRD's turbocharged V-8 was unique. The construction and metallurgy were so secret that TRD ground up the parts from its used engines and mixed all the powdered metal together, so its competition couldn't divine the nature of any single piece.

Taking a sample piece home in your lunchbox to show your kids what you make at work was grounds for getting fired.

Don't think for a minute, though, that Toyota considers its NASCAR V-8 to be retro-tech.

"The engine has been around for a long time," says White, "but it is a very highly developed package. Everyone in the garage is using the latest in metallurgy. This is Formula One and space-age technology in an archaic engine package."

TRD will use all the science and technology it can muster to come out of the box next February with a solid package. Unger says he'll look at the '07 season as a success if the Camry can be competitive against other manufacturers who have been in Nextel Cup for years.

"I expect we'll stumble a bit," Unger says. "If we can get one car in the Top 10 at the end of 2007, that would be special."

He dismisses critics who feel the entry of a Japanese car will somehow harm NASCAR and diminish its stature as an All-American form of auto racing.

It is becoming more and more difficult to define an American manufacturer. Honda and Toyota both make cars in the United States, while Dodge-an American brand owned by a German car company-assembles trucks in Mexico.

"I'm surprised at the number of people who still figure that, come next February at Daytona, when we fire up a Camry in the Nextel Cup Series, life as they know it won't ever be the same," he says.

Jerry F. Boone can be reached at jfboone@aol.com.