ESPN – Kyle Busch needed more than his immense talent to nab Toyota’s first win – Nascar
Toyota general manager Lee White stood just inside the iron fence that surrounds Victory Lane at Atlanta Motor Speedway on Sunday and watched Kyle Busch celebrate the first Sprint Cup win for the foreign manufacturer.
Frankly, most of this article is about whining and accusing others of cheating (Which seems to be an all too familiar refrain in all of sports these days), but what caught my eye is that Toyota has its first NASCAR Sprint cup win. I was a NASCAR fan for a couple of years – Dale Earnhardt’s first win at Daytona was the first race I ever watched, and the second race I saw was live at Daytona, the Pepsi 400 in 1998. By the way, I find it amusing that the Pepsi 400 is now known as the Coke Zero 400. Nice job, Coke. It’s interesting to see Toyota coming in. Never mind that Toyota doesn’t have a single car with a V-8 engine. NASCAR doesn’t seem to care that the cars on the track bear basically no resemblance to the production cars they’re named for. And it’s weird to see the 18 car not be Bobby Labonte’s green Interstate Batteries car. Anyway, I haven’t really paid any attention to NASCAR since 2004 or so, but I would have liked to have been there for Toyota’s first win. I wonder if the 300 pound guy in overalls and no shirt with a #3 shaved in his back that I saw at Daytona one year was watching. I’ll bet he was, and I’ll bet he said something disparaging about Toyota at some point in the race.