Toyota’s lack of success so far this year is concerning

The only luck that is worse than Kasey Kahne’s luck this year in the Sprint Cup Series?

With only one win to the car brand’s name (Kyle Busch at Fontana), Toyota is lacking to the four wins a piece that Ford and Chevrolet have in this year’s first nine races. In a competitive sport like NASCAR, those statistics aren’t exactly reassuring.

After a year like 2013, where Toyota had seven wins under one driver’s (Matt Kenseth) name, this year is coming off as a shock. To add insult to injury, Toyota couldn’t even bring home a win at the race under their namesake’s race last weekend at Richmond. Instead, Joey Logano stole it under the last restart… under Ford’s name.

Truthfully, the odds aren’t looking too great for them to redeem themselves this weekend at Talladega.

Since Toyota joined NASCAR’s elite top series in 2007, Toyota has only won two races at Talladega, both in 2008. Those statistics aren’t too great, especially when comparing them to Chevrolet’s six wins since then.

Significantly, nothing happened to the cars over the off season – nothing that should have messed with the strength that the cars had at this point last year. Rule changes shouldn’t have affected the way the cars run either – but perhaps that may be a culprit as they may not have figured out the perfect balance so far.

Something that might be contributing to the lack of success by Toyotas may be the fact that they are not moving forward. Ford, at the end of the year last year, had only six wins to it’s name, while Chevrolet had 16 and Toyota had 14. Ford already has a third amount of the wins that they had total last year, and Chevrolet seems just as strong, if not stronger than they were last year. Perhaps Toyota has just been left behind in an ever challenging and changing sport such as NASCAR.

Whatever it is, Toyota isn’t exactly facing the pressure yet, but it is unsettling to see such a dominating team not being able to compete as well as it has been able to in the past.

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Barry Albert

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