Toyota Racing Development boss David Wilson is happy with the four NASCAR Cup Series wins this season. But, he’s also not happy with how this year is going either.

It’s not like he’s being selfish. Don’t take him wrong. It’s just last year, Toyota won a NASCAR record 19 of the 36 points paying races run. They put three drivers in the Championship 4 and won the outright championship with Kyle Busch.

With a similar racing package in 2020 as to 2019, you’d think Toyota would pick up where they left off right? I mean the only difference was to the short track package and one of the four wins this year was on one.

Unfortunately for them, the dominance is gone and it may not be coming back anytime soon. Here’s why.

See, it’s not that they digressed. The speed from last year is still there. It’s just that there wasn’t a lot of room to develop their cars in the offseason and the only manufacturer that could do so with an update to their cars was Chevrolet.

With Chevy gaining speed and Toyota staying stagnant, their stranglehold up front has company.

“For me to suggest that we’re at 100% or we’re as good as we normally are is patently false,” Wilson, the President of Toyota Racing Development said. “What I think our competition is doing this year is very similar to what we were doing last year and what we are still doing this year.

“So it’s not that we’ve fallen behind as much as they’ve caught up. And there’s no question that the new Chevrolet Camaro and the nose that’s on that car has elevated their program.”

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Wilson, is baffled that Chevy has scored just two victories all year. With more pace than than Toyota’s, it’s shocking to him to have doubled their win total as we head to the Talladega Superspeedway this weekend.

“The fact that they’re only sitting on two wins right now is shocking to me,” Wilson continued. “I always look at not necessarily just the wins, but the potential. What is the true potential of your race car?

“You could argue that we’re punching above our weight right now and they’re not running at their full potential,” he concluded.”

The drivers also agree with that.

“I think the best group out there right now is Hendrick,” said Ryan Blaney a few weeks ago. “They have really great speed right now on the mile-and-a-halfs or the bigger tracks. I’ve seen it. They might not — they’ve kind of had some unfortunate circumstances, which is actually our team has capitalized on. The Penske group has capitalized on at a couple of them tracks, but Hendrick is really strong. I feel like we’re close with our group. We’ve just got to find a little bit more.”

Denny Hamlin, a Toyota driver, noted that Chevys car was actually built for this package and a big reason for their revival.

“Well, it’s just Chevys in general,” Hamlin said on why Chase Elliott has been so fast this season. “They’re fast, and they’re really the only manufacturer that got to build a car directly for the package that we run. These other cars, the Toyotas and Fords, were built on the low downforce package and then we added a bunch of spoiler and splitter to them. Certainly there was an advantage knowing that, okay, this is the real package, how can we optimize downforce and drag, and I think Chevys have done that.”

Wilson, says that while they just won at Martinsville, he was embarrassed by how the rest of the camp performed that night.

“In many respects, I feel much better about our loss at Atlanta than our win in Martinsville,” said Wilson. “As counterintuitive as that sounds, and the reason I say that is because Atlanta we had three cars in the top-five, we led laps and we had a couple of cars that were good enough to win that race.

“In Martinsville, we embarrassed ourselves. This is one of the most embarrassing races I can remember for the Toyota family. We weren’t ready for the new tire Goodyear brought to the race track and there are circumstances behind it, but I’m not even going to make excuses.

“We weren’t prepared for it. Our engine drivability was terrible in pit lane, on restarts and we almost really could have had our worst finish since 2007 had it not been for Martin hanging on long enough to get the car balanced correctly for the tires and putting himself in position ultimately to win the race.”

Wilson, said that while they won last weekend in Homestead too, he’s flat out sick of how these cars are rolling off the truck.

“I was encouraged with what we saw at Homestead. Where we need to be better is our consistency in how we unload from the haulers across the camp. We’ve had too many guys that are just dog crap for the first stage and use that time to try and catch up and that’s unacceptable. We should be better with the tools we have. With the experience we have, we should be better. There’s definitely room for improvement.

“Having said all that, within our camp and within the JGR camp we are still positive because we know our potential is there to lead laps and win races. If we execute consistently on pit lane, if we do a better job with our sim, we will be in a position to win more races.”

Still, it’s going to take a lot of work for Toyota’s to catch up again. Their biggest factor of all of this is the lack of practice right now to dial it in.

It’s affecting the whole manufacturer. Kyle Busch hasn’t even won a race yet.

“Joe (Gibbs) and I talked after Homestead and talked about Kyle and we’re scratching our head a little bit. You know, I’ll ad that I think a factor with Kyle and with everybody to varying degrees the fact that we’re not practicing. Now that’s not an excuse because none of us are practicing, so a lot of this is a measure of how well the teams, the OEMs can prepare and be ready to go racing. But if you know Kyle like we’ve come to know him, he’s not a driver that just straps into the car and goes.”

Plus, with everyone still operating under strict guidelines while a pandemic is still around, Alex Bowman, a Hendrick driver, says that’s a big reason to why other teams are struggling to catch up in the speed department too.

“I think it was an interesting time period, right?” said Bowman. “Guys couldn’t really be in their shops developing new stuff. You weren’t allowed to be in the wind tunnel, simulators, all that stuff. Everybody is still at home working on their notebooks, trying to piece together what they can do to make their racecars better.

“In a sense it didn’t really give people maybe the complete opportunity to catch up, but it at least gave them some opportunity.  I think for everybody at HMS to stay on top of things, improve our racecars, I think we didn’t just come back with what we had in Vegas and Fontana, I think we came back with something better.  We need to keep working on it because everybody around us is constantly getting better, as well.

“It’s really different than how we started the season the last two years.  I feel like our cars, the biggest thing, when we’re off a little bit, we’re not running 20th any more.  If we have a bad run, we fall back to eighth.

“I think that shows a lot about the strength of HMS right now. We’re just going to keep gaining on it.”

Truex Jr agrees saying that they’re close though.

“I think it’s been a little bit tough not having practice and things like that to hit it right,” said the 2017 champion. “I think our cars are close. I don’t think we’re dominant. I think there’s some really fast cars out there that we’re trying to catch up to. We really have to do all the little things right to be able to put ourselves in position to win races, and we’ve done that. We’ve been in position a few times this season, and things didn’t go the way we needed them to, and when you’re not a dominant car, you’re not just going to blow by through the field when you have issues. We definitely know we need to get better.”

Truex, says that it’s hard on them to prepare for the races even because in the Coca-Cola 600, they dominated then came back a few days later and struggled to stay in the top 25.

“That’s just where the practice thing comes in,” Truex continued. “You go back to the racetrack with your best guess of what you think is going to work, and it’s not always what you think it’s going to be. You give a great driver and crew chief and engineer and team an hour to work on a race car, they’re going to get it better.”

Last year, they won seven races at this point. This year, it’s four.

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