DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – During the last few years, drivers have drawn up their superspeedway game plans around team and manufacturer alliances, leading to dominant freight trains at the front of the pack.

That also makes Sunday’s Daytona 500 a game of numbers, with Denny Hamlin stating during Media Day on Wednesday at Daytona Int’l Speedway that he feels Toyota is at a disadvantage in Sunday’s Great American Race.

There are only six Toyotas on the entry list for this year’s season-opening Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series event, and one of those – Parker Kligerman – still has to race his way into the field through Thursday night’s Gander RV Duel at Daytona.

The other five are locked into the field, with the four Joe Gibbs Racing Toyotas of Denny Hamlin, Kyle Busch, Martin Truex Jr. and Erik Jones joined by the Leavine Family Racing entry of Matt DiBenedetto.

Though Toyota was the first manufacturer to perfect the technique of “controlling the field,” doing so to perfection in 2016 when Hamlin won the Daytona 500, in recent years it has been Ford teams that have worked together to crush the opposition.

It was prevalent during last fall’s race at Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway, when the four Stewart-Haas Racing Fords banded together to pull away from the field, and the theme continued during last Sunday’s Advance Auto Parts Clash, when four Penske-prepared Fords pulled the pack around the top lane.

Hamlin believes that it will be just as noteworthy a story when the Daytona 500 gets into its closing laps.

“The team factor is very important when it comes down to deciding Sunday’s race,” Hamlin told SPEED SPORT. “I think that’s been a lot of the reason that Team Penske and Stewart Haas have had the success that they’ve had at Daytona and Talladega in recent years. Their cars were extremely fast and they just stayed in line together. That’s something that we displayed in 2016 with our Toyota teammates, but we really haven’t been able to replicate that since then.

“Ultimately, the other manufacturers have more cars and there’s more they can do with that. Our five or six cars can stay in line all we want, but if there’s 10 Fords that stay in a line, that’s going to be faster. It’s physics,” Hamlin noted. “Once we put the blueprint out there, it’s just been impossible to repeat because we’ve been outnumbered and everyone else has taken advantage of that.”

Pressed as to whether that means Toyota is at a disadvantage for Sunday’s race, Hamlin was short and succinct in his response.

“Absolutely,” he said. “There’s no doubt that we’re at a disadvantage.”

Hamlin’s teammate Erik Jones offered his take on the subject later in the day, having seen a smaller-scale version of the conundrum during the Clash.

“I was looking at the (Clash) field before we went green, and I had a good view because we were starting dead last, but I kind of got to see it all … and Ford had almost half of the field and we had four cars,” said Jones. “It is challenging. We have six Toyotas in the 500, so it’s challenging to get all six lined up and have a big advantage. It’s just a matter of having really good cars.

“That’s going to be the only way to combat it, is that we have to have really good stuff, have our cars really fast and dialed in together and work on it in practice and try to make sure it happens in the 500.”

While he wasn’t at the Cup level in 2016, Jones does believe that race was the turning point when it comes to how teammates work together in the draft in the modern era of superspeedway racing.

“I remember watching it,” Jones said of the 2016 Daytona 500. “I think it definitely changed superspeedway racing a little bit, to where the manufacturers work together more, teams work together more and they try to get better in a line and in a pack.

“I think our cars in this race have been better than they have in the last few superspeedway races, so it might give us an opportunity to do something similar, but we’ll just have to see how it goes.”

As for the driver who nearly won that 2016 event, Truex said it still won’t be easy for a manufacturer or team to execute that kind of plan to perfection on Sunday.

“The Toyota drivers were the first ones to do that and show everybody how it could work. With that said, it was still hard to make it work,” he pointed out. “We all had to end up in the same place, which is difficult to do here, but we had a plan and it somehow miraculously worked out. We all ended up at the front at the same time and were able to get together.

“The hardest part is getting together. Staying together is not that hard,” Truex added. “For sure, we’re at a disadvantage now, just based on pure numbers. The Fords especially have been really fast at the plate tracks the last couple of years with this particular package … and now there’s so many of them that are really competitive. They’re all really good at this type of racing with the stuff they’re running. They just have a good package for here.

“It’s difficult to deal with that. They’re tough to handle, but we’ll give it our best shot on Sunday.”