MOTORSPORT: Two NASCAR titles on the trot for Toyota

Toyota couldn’t win in Formula 1 and hasn’t cracked it at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, but it’s got on top of NASCAR.

It took it almost a decade but today Toyota won its second straight manufacturer title in the top level of American stock car racing and it has its second champion driver in three years.

Kyle Busch, who races for the Toyota team of three-time Superbowl champion coach Joe Gibbs, did it first in 2015 and now Martin Truex Junior has done it for one of the sport’s smaller teams, Furniture Row Racing.

Busch finished second to Truex, 0.681 seconds behind, in the 36th and last race of the Monster Cup at Homestead-Miami Speedway in Florida.

The two Ford-mounted contenders for the title in America’s biggest race series, Kevin Harvick driving for Stewart-Haas Racing and Brad Keselowski for Team Penske, finished fourth and seventh in the finale.

Toyota won 16 races for the season, Ford and Chevrolet, traditionally the dominant manufacturer in NASCAR, 10 each.

Truex, 37, had eight wins for the year – seven of them on 1.5-mile (2.4km) speedways, or what are called in stock car racing “intermediate” oval tracks.

Truex won two championships in NASCAR’s second-tier series in the middle of last decade but wondered, when he joined Furniture Row in 2014, whether he was going to make it in the top league after modest stints with Earnhardt Ganassi Racing and Michael Waltrip Racing.

“When I got with this team ... they resurrected my career and made me a champion," Truex said of the only team based west of the Mississippi River, at Denver, Colorado.

That is also the headquarters of Furniture Row, a business with about 330 stores throughout the US and whose co-owner, Barney Visser, started the race team 12 years ago.

Visser is recovering from heart bypass surgery this month and wasn’t at the track to see first-hand Truex withstand Busch’s pressure in the closing laps of the 400-mile (640km) race, ironically sponsored by Ford.

“They (Furniture Row) are the outsiders up there in Colorado, came down here and beat all of us from North Carolina," said Dale Earnhardt Junior, NASCAR’s most popular driver since the death of his legendary father on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500 and who today completed his last full-time season.

NASCAR is still regarded as the sport of the “good ol’ boys” of America’s south, but Truex is from New Jersey, Busch from Las Vegas, Jimmie Johnson – whose record-equalling seventh NASCAR Cup title was last year – and 2014 champion Harvick are from California and Penske’s 2012 champion Keselowski from Michigan.

Keselowski has said repeatedly that the Camry model that Toyota introduced to NASCAR this year has had an advantage over its competition.

He expects that Chevrolet will catch up when it introduces its new Camaro next year to replace the SS shape derived from Holden’s outgoing Australian-made Commodore.

And he’s worried that Ford has no plans for a redesign of its Fusion body.

Penske has raced Fords in stock car racing since taking Keselowski to the title in Dodge’s last season five years ago, although ‘The Captain’ has Chevrolet power in his IndyCars – one of which won that series this year, driven by young American Josef Newgarden.

"I don't think anyone really ever had a shot this year [in NASCAR’s Monster Cup] the second that [Camry] got put on the racetrack and approved," Keselowski said again today.

"It kind of felt like Formula 1, where you had one car that made it through the gates heads and tails above everyone and your hands are tied because you're not allowed to do anything to the cars in those categories that NASCAR approves to really catch up."

Meanwhile, Earnhardt finished 25th in his final race in the No. 88 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet while Danica Patrick, also ending her full-time career but who plans to drive the Daytona 500 and Indianapolis 500 next year, crashed her Stewart-Haas Ford and was classified 37th.

Matt Kenseth was eighth in his last race for Joe Gibbs. He will be replaced by 21-year-old Erik Jones, Truex’s teammate who was crowned rookie of the year after finishing 21st at Homestead-Miami.