Call them what you want — mergers, partnerships, alliances. Call them good business decisions. Say that bigger is better and part of “new and improved” means addition by addition, not by subtraction.
Whatever they are named, all the movement among NASCAR teams this past week seemed to make sense on several different levels.
DEI needed space and was determined to overcome the defection of Dale Earnhardt, Jr. with a four-car team. It got both by putting Ginn Racing under its umbrella and moving into Ginn’s spacious Mooresville, N.C., shop. Robert Yates admitted that technology was the Achilles heel of his organization, so his partnership with Champ Car’s Newman-Haas- Lanigan Racing looks like the “beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
No one can blame them. These teams are faced with the prospect of keeping pace with Hendrick Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing and Roush Fenway Racing today, but also with what is sure to be the better, stronger Toyotas of tomorrow.
The latter may be the more relevant fear — or maybe just paranoia.
Decisions in all sports tend to be reactionary. In football, defenses used to react to big, pounding I-backs such as John Riggins. Now, they react to surgically skilled quarterbacks such as Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. Front offices build teams to prepare for them and coaches drill to stop them.
NASCAR is the same. Teams are reacting to the success of Hendrick and Roush by growing themselves — in some cases too quickly (see, Ginn) — into four-team behemoths the way Godzilla grew before stepping on Tokyo.
Speaking of Tokyo, those same teams are also reacting to what they think Toyota could become.
In a recent interview, longtime Toyota Racing Development executive David Wilson said TRD was determined not to change the economics of the sport, but TRD’s spending power and technological savvy is no doubt in the back of the minds of people such as Yates and DEI head Max Siegel.
“About two years” — that’s how long Jeff Hensley, crew chief of the Bill Davis Racing’s No. 5 Toyota Tundra, gives Toyota before the manufacturer becomes a serious, serious player in what will by that time be the Sprint Cup Series.
Just as in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series in 2004, it took Toyota half a season to score its first victory in its first year of Busch Series competition.
Right on schedule? I’d bet on it.
The competition is stiffer at NASCAR’s top level, and Toyota knows that. The money spent is far more serious and the talent level from team to team, crew to crew is far superior.
To that effect, TRD’s NASCAR Support Center will open sometime next summer in Salisbury, N.C., and will continue a Toyota philosophy of sharing the raw data available to all teams in every NASCAR series.
There will be no wind tunnel and no test track. But Toyota will keep about 40 of the 89 acres it purchased for the facility, leaving plenty of room to expand over the next five years.
By that time, Toyota should be well beyond the seven cars it now has competing in Nextel Cup and closer to a more representative 25 percent of the field — 10-12 cars. If tunnel time, which is already in short supply,  can’t be found, well, what’s a company to do? Toyota certainly has the commitment and the cash to do whatever, whenever it pleases.
And that’s where the paranoia begins for other owners — whether it is justified or like swatting at imaginary spiders during a restless sleep.
Whether Toyota wants or intends change the “economic landscape” of the sport or not, it already has. The chain-reactions have already started — they’re just being called mergers or partnerships.