Toyota: Tell Waltrip to Knock It Off

Toyota: Tell Waltrip to Knock It Off

Toyota’s debut in the all-American racing series NASCAR has been marred by controversy, and Toyota needs to step in and demand a clean up.

In this week leading up to the start of Sunday’s Daytona 500 and Toyota’s premier in the series, NASCAR handed down some of the harshest penalties in history to the No. 55 Toyota Camry race team, owned and driven by Michael Waltrip.

Lab results came back on a foreign substance NASCAR officials found in the Camry race car during the tech inspection last weekend. Tests suggests it was an illegal additive.

Toyota needs to put the hammer down and tell the Waltrip organization to knock it off.

The crew chief and a team vice president were ejected from the Daytona International Speedway and suspended indefinitely from the NASCAR garage. The crew chief was fined $100,000. Waltrip and his team were docked points.

Toyota and Japan are often criticized for playing dirty in the marketplace in terms of favorable exchange rates and such. Criticism is especially harsh from the patriotic, domestically loyal crowd like the NASCAR fans Toyota is wooing. Toyota doesn’t need to have a racecar team reinforce that cheating image.

And Toyota doesn’t need any more public relations black eyes, of which it has had many in the past year, ranging from sexual harassment charges to class-action lawsuits over product quality.

Toyota needs race clean and win, fair-and-square.

Michelle Krebs:  is Editor-in-Chief of AutoObserver.com. Follow @AutoObserver on Twitter.