By Eric Young

During a media appearance at the Chicagoland Speedway Friday, Brad Keselowski, part owner of RFK Racing, credited the collaboration between Toyota teams with the success they have been seeing on the track. 

He especially pointed to the collaboration between Joe Gibbs Racing and 23Xi. 

Keselowski said a change occurred around 2020 to 2021 where the sport shifted behind the scenes after the success of Furniture Row Racing, which won a championship with Martin Truex Jr. in 2017 and shut down due to lack of sponsorship at the end of the following season. He said the engineering was “taken away from the teams based on rules and procedures and given to the manufacturers.”

He said it created a shift that prevented another team from coming in like Furniture Row and seeing success. 

“I think those rules were targeted exactly at Furniture Row and the fact that they came in and they were successful,” Keselowski said. “They spent a ton of money and they went away, and kind of the dialogue at that time was that that’s not good. There were comments that Furniture Row bought a championship. I don’t feel that way, although I do feel like they spent a lot of money. So the rules and all the things behind the scenes got altered and pushed in such a way as to prevent that from possibly happening again, and I think that’s where we are right now.”

He said the unintended consequence of that was the creation of a stalemate between organizations, with the manufacturers then deciding their favorite teams based on that, with the top teams getting the most manufacturer support. But now, he said, Toyota is shaking up that model, which has given them an advantage. 

“They’ve recognized that stalemate is not necessarily good for the sport, or for them as an OEM, and they’ve done a lot of things to push elite collaboration amongst their top organizations so that they have, for reference, two kind of A organizations rather than an A, B, or C,” he said. “As I’ve seen to date, the other OEMs have not done that. And Toyota is making them pay for that with results on the racetrack. They deserve credit for that.”

During his media availability a few minutes later, Denny Hamlin, who owns 23Xi and drives for Joe Gibbs Racing, acknowledged the collaboration, but that it’s not coming from the manufacturer insomuch as it’s coming from the teams. 

“I certainly think Toyota has a role in it, but I don’t know that Toyota’s that much different than the other manufacturers,” Hamlin said. “We just, we pay a fee. So that’s the difference. It’s not like Toyota forces us to work together, we chose to be affiliated with Joe Gibbs Racing, and for us, we felt like it would shorten up our learning curve, get us competitive quicker. And now it’s a relationship that, I mean, we still pay. But the relationship definitely goes back and forth. There’s certainly information going both ways through that tunnel, so it works in that kind of way. But it’s not something that’s forced by the manufacturers.”

Hamlin said while that alliance isn’t exactly necessary, “it doesn’t hurt.”

“It’s a benefit, but it’s something that, it’s not for free,” Hamlin said. “I think it’s a really good deal for Joe Gibbs Racing, because you get paid and you get some information, and then for us, it allows us to hire a lot less people. We could take the money and just hire a lot less people, but then is that the best way to do it, to have two organizations spending the same money on the same thing and likely getting the same answer? That’s not the best way to stack your resources, I wouldn’t think.”

But he added that collaboration is not the only reason for the success of Toyota teams, currently. 

Keselowski said it’s up to Ford and Chevrolet to react to what Toyota is doing, and so far that hasn’t seemed to happen. 

“I think RFK is doing all the things it needs to do to position itself to be successful if that were to happen, particularly in the Ford camp,” he said. “But at this point, we haven’t seen that level of collaboration at Ford that we see at Toyota. And it creates challenges for the program, and I have not seen from the outside — I’m not inside Chevrolet — the same things there.

“We’re having one of those seasons where it looks like Toyota is going to dominate throughout, and there’s a great argument to be made that they’re winning races in the boardroom with some really great decision making. And they deserve the credit for that success.”

Keselowski said Ford has a new car coming next season, which may help, as it seems to have with Toyota and Chevrolet since the inception of the Next Gen car. 

“So it will be interesting to see where that goes,” he said. “But I think if you’re going to beat Toyota, you have to have at least two elite organizations collaborating at very, very high levels and sharing the elite resources that are specific to the OEM. And I only see Toyota doing that right now.”

He pointed to the season that Joey Logano is having this year as an example of the issues. 

“I think Joey Logano’s a fantastic race car driver,” Keselowski said. “He’s won multiple championships. If you looked at his stat lines this year in kind of a silo, you’d say it’s not been a good year for him, and maybe he’s not an elite race car driver. I don’t think that’s the case. I think that’s crap. I think that the cars aren’t where they need to be, and I feel the same about myself.”

“That’s not a dig at the crew chiefs or the race engineers, but philosophically the sport has changed now where the races are less in the hands of the crew chiefs and the race engineers and more in the hands of the OEMs,” he continued. “I think what I’m trying to say is you’ve got to give credit to Toyota for pushing it to another level and innovating their organizations and being successful and everybody else needs to step up.”