The Camrys Are Coming

When the NASCAR season kicks off next month at Daytona, it will mark a watershed in the sport's modern era as Toyota becomes the first Japanese manufacturer in the top-level Nextel Cup.* Today's New York Times has an article about the anxiety that is brewing in stock car country about that event. The main concern is that Toyota, flush with cash as it readies to usurp General Motors at the top of the global automotive heap, will spend so freely as to drastically increase the cost to the rest of the field. It's not an senseless concern - Toyota has thrown obscene amounts of money at other series (IMSA GTP and CART) to climb on top of the field, dominate it, and then run off, leaving the dried up husk of a series behind. Only in F1, where everybody expects enormous budgets, has Toyota not found success.

I'll be interested to see, when the season gets underway, what the majority of NASCAR fans thing of this development, given that of the vehicles involved, only Toyota's Camry is actually built in the United States. Not that the race cars have anything to do with the street cars, of course. "Stock cars" my arse.

Toyota is not the first foreign manufacturer to participate in NASCAR (Dodge's German parentage notwithstanding), as someone ran and won (once, I think) in a Jaguar in back in the 1950s.