For the past decade, Toyota has provided the standard when it comes to driver development.
The manufacturer was the first to build a dedicated pipeline for drivers to follow, starting at the grassroots levels and climbing the ladder to the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series.
Over the years, some of the brightest young stars have used Toyota Racing Development as a platform to launch their careers and maintain them over extended periods.
The Toyota dirt-track program — run largely in conjunction with the well-known Keith Kunz Curb-Agajanian Motorsports midget team — has allowed drivers such as Kyle Larson, Christopher Bell and Rico Abreu to climb into NASCAR’s top three series, while others such as Harrison Burton, Christian Eckes and Erik Jones found their way through TRD’s asphalt late model program.
At the head of it all is Jack Irving, director of team and support services for TRD, who has been one of the masterminds behind identifying talent and shepherding drivers through the program since it came into the mainstream a decade ago.
While Irving wouldn’t tip exactly what he and his scouting team look for in a driver, he told SPEED SPORT it is far from a simple process.
“We’ve created ways of analyzing data to locate a driver,” said Irving. “We look at the equipment they’re in, the overall ability, the strength of the field they’re competing against and other factors. We’ll run them through various tests with different setups and crew chiefs and evaluate them. We also have a website that drivers who we aren’t actively recruiting can go on and fill out a résumé of sorts. We have everything on it, from personal information to racing statistics. It lets us sort of keep tabs on them.
“We rate drivers on a multitude of things. For me, it’s on a 1-10 scale. At the track, we might get ratings from four or five different people, and we can use those analytics to create comparisons for different data,” Irving explained. “We’ve got to find the best kids at a young age and be able to bring them along and develop them within our program.”
One of the more recent tools Irving and the Toyota team have used to earmark young drivers with high potential for success is the Toyota Racing Development Combine, which started five years ago and was held this year at California’s Irwindale Speedway.
Drivers such as Riley Herbst, Burton and Todd Gilliland were past participants in the combine before landing Toyota-supported rides.
“When we did the combine initially four or five years ago, there were a lot of young kids racing,” Irving noted. “We wanted to get them together and figure out how we could get eyes on them and learn from them. This (year) was the second combine we’ve done of this nature to evaluate the newest talent wanting to make their way into the sport.”
While Toyota’s involvement with Kunz’s team goes as far back as 2009 with Cole Whitt, it wasn’t until 2013 that the fire was lit to push their driver development ladder system into high gear.
That was the year Larson, who first burst into the spotlight with Toyota and Kunz in the midget ranks, abandoned ship for an opportunity with Chevrolet and Chip Ganassi Racing because there was simply no room at the inn for him to move up within the Toyota pipeline.
It was also a moment David Wilson, president and general manger of TRD, vowed to never repeat.
“(Losing Larson) was definitely a wake-up call for us,” Wilson said. “We had to step back a little bit and then step up to the plate. Manufacturers have struggled with real development programs in the past, since we don’t actively run teams.
“What Kyle did was definitely a disappointment to us. … Since then, we’ve been more proactive.”
That meant formalizing their development program and making a clearly defined pipeline from one rung of the ladder to the next.
