Imagine that you’re sitting on your couch, watching your favorite college basketball team in the middle of a heated conference matchup.
The adult beverage is cold, the wings are hot, the arena is full and life could not get any better. Your team goes up early and even takes a lead into halftime.
Then, the game goes on and the score gets closer and closer, until the last five minutes of play.
In those five minutes, your favorite team proceeds to make one of 14 field goal attempts. Heartbreak.
You’ve been there, right? That’s exactly where Toyota is in the NASCAR Cup Series, and not enough people are talking about it.
That statistic isn’t an exaggeration for the sake of analysis, either. Going back 14 races, a Toyota has been parked in victory lane just one time. It might feel like forever ago at this point, but that winning driver was Tyler Reddick, whose playoff and Championship 4 hopes are still very much alive.
Alongside him at the moment is fellow Toyota driver Christopher Bell, who has been a mainstay in the playoffs for a few seasons now, despite consistently coming up short in the end.
The fact of the matter is that it’s not racing poorly. The finishes are consistently high enough, but with such a long victory lane drought, could it have an effect on the drivers’ performance headed into the final round?
It’s apparent that looking back on recent races isn’t going to benefit the Toyota drivers. So it only makes sense to look forward.
First up, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and here’s where Toyota might have its best chance.
Looking back at the race there earlier in the year, Kyle Larson took home the win, but it’s the rest of the finishing order that raises an eyebrow.
Four Toyotas finished inside the top 10: Reddick, Ty Gibbs (fifth), Martin Truex Jr. (seventh) and Denny Hamlin (eighth). It doesn’t take a mathematician to know that two of those Toyota drivers are in the hunt for the championship, a good sign for the manufacturer.
With Christopher Bell winning last year’s race at Homestead-Miami Speedway, fans might think he has a great shot to win it this year, and they wouldn’t be wrong.
However, there’s an X-factor in this situation.
Larson is historically dominant at Homestead and with the year he’s had, it’s going to be tough to pick against him. That brings the attention to Martinsville Speedway and Phoenix Raceway.
Of course, Martinsville is a short track, which benefits some racers more than others, and some of the Championship 4 have found success there. However, Martinsville serves as a wild card. Any of the solid short track racers who can win will be gunning for it, and that makes this race unpredictable.
That leaves the big one: Phoenix.
This may be Toyota’s second best chance to snag a win — and on the grandest stage of them all, no less. Bell also won that race earlier this season to punch his ticket into the playoffs, and led 50 laps en route to doing so. Additionally, Reddick notched a top 10 in that race, if only just. Two races, then — the first of the round of four and the last — serve as Toyota’s best chance of getting back to victory lane.
It doesn’t sound like Toyota’s path back to a championship is all that murky, then. The goal from here on out has to be simple: be there at the end. Toyota has ridden its consistency throughout 2024, and as a result, it hasn’t needed an astronomical amount of luck to get to this position.
But it’ll need it soon, and there’s no time like the present for lightning to strike.
Tanner Marlar is a staff writer for Sports Illustrated’s OnSI Network, a contributor for TopSpeed.com, an AP Wire reporter, an award-winning sports columnist and talk show host and master's student at Mississippi State University. Soon, Tanner will be pursuing a PhD. in Mass Media Studies. Tanner began working with Frontstretch as an Xfinity Series columnist in 2022.