Despite Toyota's growing pains, Jarrett not giving up
Veteran forced to rely on provisionals in all three races
Last Friday, he took his third past champion's provisional in as many weekends just to make the race. On Saturday, his No. 44 car was slowest in both Nextel Cup practice sessions. On Sunday he finished a distant and anonymous 33rd place, four laps behind the winner at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
It wasn't the kind of weekend Dale Jarrett is accustomed to. But it's the kind he's having to adjust to in his new world driving a Toyota for Michael Waltrip Racing.
The 32-time Nextel Cup race winner and 1999 series champion has been relegated to the role of also-ran as his new manufacturer and new team try to find their way in their first seasons on NASCAR's premier tour. It's a transition that's proven more difficult than even the driver expected.
"It is probably a bigger hill to climb than what we thought at the beginning," Jarrett said. "But if you were realistic about it and looked at what we needed to do in terms of getting all three teams together and all the people and parts and pieces that it takes to make that happen, plus trying to get cars ready for Daytona and having the current downforce cars and the Car of Tomorrow ready, it's a huge undertaking. It's just a difficult process."
Struggles on the racetrack are nothing new to the 50-year-old Jarrett, who finished in the top 10 only four times in his final season at Robert Yates Racing, and has one Nextel Cup race victory in his last 145 starts. But little has gone right for Jarrett -- or the three-car Waltrip organization as a whole -- since he drew the pole for the preseason Budweiser Shootout.
In three events, he's yet to qualify on time. His 22nd-place finish was the best among all Toyotas in the Daytona 500, but he hasn't cracked the top 30 since. Las Vegas was his young season in microcosm -- missing out on practice time because of being at the back of the inspection line, never getting the car quite right, and never emerging as a factor.
"I knew what I was getting into here. Would I have expected that we could do a little more than what we have? Sure. You always like to think that. But I took this because of the challenge, and it's certainly been every bit of that. I can get through. I think I've become more concerned with the guys on the race team," he said.
"It's not a lot of fun for anybody whenever you're running the way that we are. But if we're realistic, we need to understand that it is going to take time, and if we can continue to work together, it will pay dividends down the road. That's what we have to believe in right now."
Many believe the Car of Tomorrow, which debuts next week at Bristol, Tenn., will level the field between the haves and have-nots in Nextel Cup racing. It may -- eventually. But right now, start-up teams like Waltrip's are struggling to build their car counts in a season that demands a mixture of COTs and current vehicles. It didn't help that Waltrip's team only moved into its new facility on Feb. 15.
"We're definitely still in the process of building a team," said Matt Borland, Jarrett's crew chief. "When I got here in December, I thought everyone had been here a while, and you pretty much started to learn ... that everybody had been there for a week or two. We're all learning how to work with each other better and get the communication better between everyone on the team and in the whole organization. We're trying to get all that built up, while at the same time get to all the races and run better at all the races. It's a building process, and it's going to be that way the whole year."
Car sponsor UPS joined Jarrett in 2001, two seasons removed from his Cup championship, when the driver was in the midst of a seven-year streak of finishing ninth or better in series points. The company became synonymous with Jarrett through a series of television commercials, and made the leap to Toyota with him.
"I would say maybe it's a little bigger of a challenge than perhaps we expected. But I think we were very clear in that we were going with a new race team and new manufacturer, and that there would be challenges. So I think we're fine with how things are going," said Laura Kouns, the company's motorsports marketing manager.
"We've had a lot of communication with the team from the very beginning, all through the building process, and extremely frequent communication now. I think it's something that we expected, and that we knew we were getting ourselves into."
Many of Jarrett's struggles are shared by the entire Toyota fleet. Unlike Dodge, which in 2001 built its Nextel Cup operation primarily through existing teams -- the lone exception being its flagship, Evernham Motorsports -- Toyota started mainly from scratch. The fact that it wasn't cherry-picking other teams became almost a point of pride for the Japanese carmaker in the preseason.
Now Toyota is feeling the painful effects of that strategy. With no 2006 owner points to fall back on -- the switch to 2007 points doesn't occur for two more weeks -- Toyota teams have had to rely on speed, which has been hard to find. Jeremy Mayfield of Bill Davis Racing has missed every event this year. So has A.J. Allmendinger of Team Red Bull. Waltrip and Red Bull's Brian Vickers have qualified for just one race each.
Vickers' top-10 finish at California stands as the lone bright spot for a cash-rich manufacturer that some in the industry thought would spend its way quickly to the top. Even UPS seems surprised at the slow start.
"I would say personally, I am a little bit surprised," UPS's Kouns said. "Ever since Toyota announced it was coming in, there were a lot of naysayers who were saying how difficult it would be. I personally didn't think it would be quite this difficult. So I would say yes, I am surprised."
Jarrett hasn't missed a start, but he's used up three of the six past champion provisional starts allotted to him this season by NASCAR. Sunday brings a race at Atlanta Motor Speedway, his car sponsor's home track.
"I've never been a great qualifier, but that aside is something we need to get better at. That's just not myself. All of our cars at Michael Waltrip Racing, and basically all of the cars in the Toyota group, we haven't been very good at that part of it yet," he said.
"We understand we have major commitments to huge sponsors that we're fortunate to have at Michael Waltrip Racing. We have a lot of good people. We have obviously a new manufacturer in Toyota that is very supportive of everything we're doing. The guys are continuing to work hard. They're there earlier and later than they were at the beginning of this, because they want to get through this. Nobody's given up."
