http://www.roanoke.com/sports/racing/wb/104313
New breed of Toyotas at Daytona
Ed Hardin | Landmark News Service
"Show me the carburetor."
OK, so that's not much of a battle cry in racing these days, no more than say, "Show me the wheel-base specs," or, "Show me the cylinder-bore center lines." Toyota can produce all those, and NASCAR can pretend it approves, and let's face it, the resistance to Japanese cars coming to NASCAR ended long ago -- about the time the car maker showed up in Daytona Beach with a truck bed full of money.
So here we are, a week away from the Daytona 500, facing the usual field of Fords, Dodges and Chevrolets. And by about 3:15 that afternoon there will be something never before seen in a Cup race in the stock-car South.
A dad-blame Toyota.
Now most of us have grown up with these things. Your sister had one back in the '70s or your next-door neighbor's mom, you know, the lady your dad said might be a communist? It was a sad little car, a two-door box that sounded like a sewing machine when it cranked in the morning. In fact, it sounded like a sewing machine when it didn't crank in the morning.
They always needed working on, and your dad would always volunteer. They had no carburetor. They operated off something called fuel injection and nothing in the American South was more suspicious than fuel injection in the late '60s and early '70s. Those sad little Toyota motors looked like something you could build with an Erector Set, and they didn't require the same sort of shade-tree service normal cars called for.
Your father could get any engine started with a rag and a screw driver because he'd just remove the air filter and cover the carburetor with an old oily rag and give the side of it a whap and just about any motor in America would fire right up, sometimes literally spewing a ball of flame straight up through the barrels.
One of my fondest childhood memories is of Mr. Ledbetter from down the street in Charlotte working on an old Ford one time when fire shot straight up out of the engine and engulfed his head in flames. You could see the silhouette of him inside the fire, his cigarette still hanging from his mouth. He never moved. The engine started right up.
Driving to Daytona this week, don't expect to see any of those Toyotas from the old days. The average life-span of a Toyota Corona was about three months. Now they have something called a Camry, but you won't see one of those driving down either, at least not like the one NASCAR has allowed into the big race Sunday.
The 2007 Toyota Camry is the Motor Trend Car of the Year, a family sedan with standard cruise control, air conditioning, six-speaker sound system, remote keyless entry, power locks and windows, ABS, something like seven airbags and tire-pressure monitoring systems. Whatever.
The 2007 Toyota Camry comes to Daytona with nothing bought from the local service shops, nothing seen on showroom floors and nothing available at zero percent financing. The 2007 Toyota Camry, Motor Trend's Car of the Year, doesn't exist. At least not in the NASCAR tradition. The car Michael Waltrip and his friends will drive this week is a decal covering a mechanical creation, a stock car that isn't stock surrounding a V-8 engine that doesn't come standard -- never has, never will.
The heart and soul of stock-car racing has always been the carburetor mounted atop the manifold of a Detroit fire-breathing V-8 power plant, producing American horsepower and American noise. The truth is, Toyotas are for girls.
OK, I'm through now. I'm over it. The old days are gone forever. Bring on every car maker in the world. Nobody uses carburetors anymore except NASCAR, and let's be honest, none of the cars we'll see this week exist in any car dealership in the world.
Toyota is as much a part of NASCAR as that Car of Tomorrow thing that comes out next month. Once it becomes the only car on the circuit, any car company in the universe can come into the sport with a few decals and a couple of scientists. From here on out, that's what we'll be watching -- science experiments going around in circles, Fords looking exactly like the Chevrolets, Dodges looking exactly like dad-blame Toyotas.