Toyotas at Indy

This will be the first time a Toyota has raced at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series. But Toyota is no stranger to Indy.
Gil de Ferran won the 2003 Indianapolis 500 in a Toyota-powered Indy car. And Toyotas raced at Indianapolis in the Indy Racing League for years before leaving the series two years ago.
Dale Jarrett, driver of the No. 44 Toyota for Michael Waltrip Racing, is a two-time winner at Indy. He won the Cup races at Indy in 1996 and 1999. But qualifying for the race this year will probably be as monumental for Jarrett as winning those two races.
“Indianapolis is a difficult race track," Jarrett said. “It’s a totally unique track with four distinct corners. If you’re off just a little bit, it really magnifies because of the long straightaways. The teams that are on their game are usually the ones you’ll see doing well.”
For a time, it looked like A.J. Allmendinger was on his way to racing at Indy in an open-wheel race car. Allmendinger was racing in the Champ Car World Series before making the switch to NASCAR and the Toyota-powered Team Red Bull to start the 2007 season.
“If someone asked me about racing a stock car at Indy, I would have said: ‘You’re crazy,’ ” said Allmendinger, driver of the No. 84 Toyota for Team Red Bull. “But, I’ve quickly learned -- especially with everything that happened to me last year -- you never know what you’re going to get in your career. I’ve lived a pretty comfortable life in the sense that I was with the same team in Atlantics and moved up to Champ Car with them for three years. Then, I found out what racing is really like -- you get fired and go to a new team, and you switch series. Now, I know that it’s a racing career and it’s a racing life, and one day to the next you never know what’s going to happen. So, I could be on jet skis next week – you never know.”