Gibbs Won't Miss A Beat With Toyota Switch

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You're wondering how much time it will take Joe Gibbs Racing to get back up to speed after switching to Toyota next year and whether Tony Stewart will go two or three years without winning a race.

The answers are: practically no time and no way.

Gibbs may endure a hiccup or two at the start of next year, but Stewart, Denny Hamlin and team newcomer Kyle Busch will continue to win races, and no one should be surprised if all three are back in the Chase.

"If we thought we were going to come out of the box slow next year, we wouldn't have done it," team president J.D. Gibbs said of the decision to switch. "We should come out of the box just as strong as we were this year. If not, I think we'll all be really disappointed."

There's a three-word explanation for why Gibbs will hardly miss a beat in switching from Chevrolets to Toyotas: Car of Tomorrow. It's the great equalizer, and it will be used in all 36 races next year.

Some months ago, reporters asked Nextel Cup director John Darby what the Car of Tomorrow should be called now that it's actually on the track. "NASCAR race car," he said. And that's what it is, a "spec" car that underneath its fake headlights and taillights is almost identical no matter the brand name put upon it.

As Jimmie Johnson's crew chief, Chad Knaus, succinctly puts it, "There are no differences in the race cars."

It's About The Teams

The COT, as it's still called because nobody has come up with anything better, has brought NASCAR ever closer to its goal of isolating competition to the teams, drivers and pit crews.

The only real difference between a Ford, Chevy, Dodge and Toyota going forward will be in the engine, and even with the engine, the NASCAR rules are so tight there aren't substantial differences.

What that means for Gibbs is that it'll be business as usual.

"On the performance side, related to the chassis and the bodies, I really don't see much of a change coming for next year," said Mike Ford, Hamlin's crew chief. "It's how quickly we can adapt to the engine."

Enter Mark Cronquist, the head engine guy at JGR whose Chevrolet power has Stewart and Hamlin running for the championship starting this weekend at New Hampshire. He plans to adapt pretty quickly.

Cronquist was intimately involved with developing Chevrolet's new and stout R07 engine, and he'll incorporate his considerable knowledge of that engine into building the new Toyota engines.

"The thing my group has to work on is making sure it is up to our standards of what we normally do, being the performance, the torque, the horsepower and stuff like that," Cronquist said.

Tweaking The Engine

Toyota's Nextel Cup engine is a work in progress - literally. Toyota Racing Development in California builds all of Toyota's current Cup engines except those raced by Bill Davis Racing, and subtle improvements called "updates" are constantly being made.

The feeling at JGR - and there's no reason to believe it isn't justified - is that between TRD's ongoing development and the work Cronquist will do with the engine over the summer, Gibbs will have a pretty good power plant come the 2008 Daytona 500.

"From my standpoint, there's a bit of an unknown, but I think we've got the people here to go to Daytona and the first few races and be just as competitive as we've been in the past," said Greg Zipadelli, Stewart's crew chief.

A new era has dawned in NASCAR in which the car being raced isn't nearly as important as the teams and drivers racing them. Gibbs has been one of the best, winning three of the last seven championships and having two of the favorites in this year's Chase. Stewart, Hamlin and Busch are three of the best drivers.

This won't be a case of taking one step backward to take two steps forward. More like, it'll be business as usual.

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