TOYOTA ENGINES TAKE LONG ROUTE
If a Toyota reaches victory lane for the first time this Sprint Cup season Sunday at Auto Club Speedway, its engine will have traveled roughly 5,000 miles.
But the power plant will have been built only 50 miles from the track.
After being completed at Toyota Racing Development’s base in Orange County two weeks ago, the engines were shipped to the Charlotte area headquarters of Michael Waltrip Racing and Joe Gibbs Racing, dropped under the hoods of Camrys and freighted back to Southern California on 18-wheelers this week.
If that sounds like a logistical nightmare, consider it’s a dance that happens 36 times a season in NASCAR’s premier series.
“If you look at having a facility 2,500 miles removed from our team partners, the obvious question is, ‘Why are you here?’ ” TRD President David Wilson said.
The answer is a 79,000-squarefoot facility that has been churning out high-quality horsepower for nearly 20 years. Located in a mix of business parks and residential neighborhoods on the edge of the John Wayne Airport, TRD’s engine hub handles about 375 rebuilds annually of the 100 engines it rotates among its five full-time cars in Cup.
“If this facility didn’t exist, we certainly would have built everything in North Carolina,” Wilson said Thursday as TRD opened its engine shop to the media for the first time since entering Cup in 2007. “But there’s tremendous amount of capital investment here, and arguably the biggest consideration is the people.”
There are 180 people (of more than 30 nationalities, reflecting the region’s diversity) building, designing and developing the engines, which are done two Fridays ahead of every race (the last of the engines for the April 6 race at Texas Motor Speedway was being finished Thursday).
Teams return them in an unmarked, 600-pound silver crate every Monday (shipping is about $1,000 per engine) for a 15-hour disassembly to evaluate performance and potential problems.
Wilson said TRD still evaluates its Southern California base. Toyota also has a 35,000-squarefoot chassis shop in Salisbury, N.C., that has ample room for expansion, but there are no shortterm plans for relocating its engine building to the East Coast.
“We always have it on our radar,” he said. “At some point, it will happen in an evolutionary sense. But the recommendation I give management is it doesn’t make sense. The acid test is if we can’t deliver a product as good or better than in North Carolina, we have to move.”
For now, a video conference with its Cup teams every Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. will suffice.
“We want them to view us as the engine shop down the hallway,” Wilson said with a laugh. “It’s just a little longer hallway than usual.”