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NASCAR

Toyota engine issues still a mystery, no new problems found Saturday

By SceneDaily.com

Mar 1, 2009

Toyota teams did not change any engines after practice Saturday nor Sunday morning as they deal with issues in the Toyota Racing Development engines.

Four of the six teams that have the newest version of the TRD engine have changed this weekend. Red Bull Racing’s Scott Speed and Brian Vickers, Michael Waltrip Racing’s David Reutimann and JTG Daugherty Racing’s Marcos Ambrose have had their teams change engines. Driver/owners Michael Waltrip and Robby Gordon have not changed engines.

TRD engineers have not yet confirmed what exactly is wrong, but it is a wear issue between the camshaft and lifter that plagued those four cars at Vegas as well as two others last weekend at Auto Club Speedway in California. The engines that were replaced were torn down Saturday for NASCAR officials to inspect and have now been sent to TRD’s headquarters in Costa Mesa, Calif.

“We’re doing the proper analysis in the lab and trying to get to the bottom of it,” said Andy Graves, TRD’s Sprint Cup manager. “Unfortunately, it’s still a little bit of a mystery.”

After practice Saturday, the engines – with different lubricants and coatings than what were used Friday – looked OK, Graves said Sunday morning.

“Everything was fine yesterday,” Graves said. “The changes that we implemented yesterday morning, after practice we did a check and inspected our cams and lifters and everything looks fine.

“So we’ve got our fingers crossed for today. … I actually feel pretty decent. We’ll see if we get 50-75 miles on an engine, if we don’t see any damage popping, we’re pretty confident it will be OK.”

The race today already was expected to be rough on engines as lap times are three-quarters of a second quicker than a year ago.

“Tire degradation is no greater than it was, so because of that, you’re higher in the RPM band, you’re on a wide-open throttle more and it’s harder on the engines,” Graves said.

The same type of engine is expected for use at Atlanta next week, and then TRD would have time to fix the problem as it would have four weeks until the next race that this engine would be used. A different engine package is slated for the short-track races at Bristol and Martinsville later this month.

“We’re hoping that it all work out that we can bring these changes to Atlanta,” Graves said. “There are some people in Costa Mesa building some hybrid specs between this engine spec and our last, to take a partial step back if we see we have some more problems today.”