“The Toyota Way,” a famous blueprint for the workplace culture of the world’s largest automaker, is a collection of core values rooted in a Japanese philosophy known as “Kaizen.”
It essentially means “continuous improvement” through small and persistent upgrades that are derived from constant observations and learnings about how to make performance gains.
“Every improvement, regardless of size, is valuable,” according to “The Toyota Way” listed on the company’s website. “Encouraging both incremental and breakthrough innovative thinking, we seek to evolve with Kaizen, never accepting the status quo.”
It’s a concept that resonates when looking at Toyota’s surge to open the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs.
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Before sweeping the top two spots at Darlington and Gateway and leading 515 of the first 607 laps in the 10-race title run, there were few signs that Camrys would flaunt such dominance. Before the playoff opener, Toyota had won four of the past 18 races.
But in the background, the dedication to progress clearly continued — slowly but surely.
“We have made some minor improvements to the performance over the course of the last six or eight weeks,” Toyota Racing Development president Tyler Gibbs said after Denny Hamlin’s win at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway.
That was a rather understated evaluation of results that are setting off alarm bells for the competition. Defending Cup Series champion Joey Logano notably conceded after Gateway that Toyota “has got the smoke” because he was unable to outrace Hamlin. Camrys took five of the top eight positions at Gateway after claiming six of the top seven spots at Darlington.
“They’re ridiculously fast,” Logano said of the Toyotas. “They’ve got a lot of grip, and they’ve got a lot of horsepower. We’ve got a lot of work to do to catch up. We’ve got to be absolutely perfect in every category to contend, and we need them to make mistakes, which they do. We have the potential to do it; it’s just going to be really challenging.”
Just the odds seem to favor a Toyota driver winning the championship this season for the Cup Series’ most overdue manufacturer. It’s been six years and a combined five championships for Chevrolet and Ford since Kyle Busch clinched the 2019 title with a victory at Homestead-Miami Speedway — the third Toyota championship in five years at the 1.5-mile track.
The Championship 4 race shifted to Phoenix Raceway in 2020, and the manufacturer has barely been a factor since. A Toyota title contender had led at the 1-mile oval in only one of the past five season finales — Martin Truex Jr. in 2021. Hamlin (2020-21) and Christopher Bell (2022-23) both went to Phoenix with championship aspirations and were shut out of a turn at the front.
As a 1.25-mile track whose banking and shape have been compared with Phoenix, Gateway could be viewed as an encouraging sign for a turnaround in Toyota’s title prospects — though the results were downplayed by the head of its NASCAR program.
“It’s race by race, week to week,” Gibbs said. “Anything can happen. We’re just going to focus one race at a time. I know that’s cliché. It doesn’t really do us any good to look that far down the road. We’ll prepare for this week. Look at the week after as well, because it takes so much work to get ready for these races. … We’re just, again, going to keep our heads down and keep preparing the way we have.”
Humility. It’s another principle that undergirds the Toyota worldview.
“We welcome competition without ego. It pushes us to improve.”
That’s straight from “The Toyota Way” — and it might be the path to a 2025 championship.
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