Toyota Racing Development has become entrenched in American motorsports. General Manager Jack Irving describes the division's current focus, why its driver development program remains the flagship example, and the need to attract personnel into racing beyond the race track.
 

Toyota Racing Development (TRD) is best known for its off-road trim packages on the popular Toyota Tacoma and Tundra pickup trucks, as well as the capable Toyota 4Runner and other Toyota vehicles. But there's far more to this enterprise than shock and wheel packages. TRD oversees Toyota's entire motorsports program, from NASCAR to sprint cars to off-road to the SRO GR Cup series for the Toyota GR86 sports car.

Overseeing this wide-ranging involvement and driver development combine is TRD General Manager Jack Irving. Unlike most people managing motorsports operations for global automakers, Irving came up through facilities management, then worked team and support services before taking charge of the entire operation. Backed by the world's largest automaker, TRD has irons in every fire from retail trim packages to bringing up the next generation of great drivers under the Toyota banner. We caught up with Irving on a rare vacation day to find out more about everything TRD.

PRI: Let's start from basics. Can you tell us what TRD is all about?

Irving: Twenty or 30 years ago, TRD was started as a performance part of Toyota to make aftermarket pieces and parts, and then it evolved into racing. Our marketing back then was convoluted. So you had Toyota Racing, you had Toyota Racing Development, you had Toyota Motorsports. Over time it started to consolidate into TRD USA, Inc.

We do a lot of technical support with the teams. You need to be at a certain level to be able to use the resources that we have. They're very advanced, so we need to be with advanced teams who can take the data and information we give and use the tools to bring their performance to a level that is competitive. We do all North American racing, so heavy NASCAR, but before NASCAR it was CART and IndyCar and off-road. We've always had an off-road presence. We still do have an off-road presence in stadium trucks, but our focus over the last 15 to 20 years has been NASCAR and grassroots racing.

We've evolved in the last 10 years to be more focused on NASCAR and grassroots racing, which is dirt. It's because we make the dirt engine for 410s [sprint cars] and for midgets, and then we got heavier into sports car racing with the GR brand over the last eight years or whatever it's been with the RC F and Lexus. We've had iterations into GT4 with the Supra and then in the GR Cup with the GR86.

In the last five years, TRD USA has started making performance parts for what we call the five brothers, being the TRD-branded trucks. What we learn from racing, we try to put into the road-going cars.

NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series pilot Corey Heim joined Toyota's Driver Development Program in 2024. Here, Heim (right) celebrates his win in the 2024 XPEL 225 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race at Circuit of The Americas with Toyota Racing Development President Tyler Gibbs (left) and Jack Irving. Photos courtesy of Toyota GAZOO Racing. 

PRI: Tell us about GAZOO Racing. Where did it come from and what does it mean?

Irving: So this is really from Akio Toyoda [chairman of Toyota Motor Corporation]. He raced under "Morizo" as his secret name when he entered races. He was racing because he just truly loved to race cars. GAZOO Racing formed from that. It was initially intended to be a small effort by him and his group to race and to bring back the core of performance. But it's gotten bigger and bigger, and it's caught fire with the way we develop cars going forward.

When I was a kid, you could buy a car that had performance at a reasonable price, and I think GAZOO Racing is about performance and value and bringing back this enthusiast focus on the Toyota brand. Where we have gotten more and more involved is the iteration of that GR brand from a street performance car to an actual race track performance car. There are differences.

PRI: Let's talk about NASCAR. What are your goals for the series and how do you work with the NASCAR teams?

Irving: NASCAR is an amazing series for us. It opened up a lot of markets. It allows us to communicate directly to consumers in a very different way. Yes, it's a technology that wasn't our bread and butter. We don't do pushrod V8s, or hadn't beforehand. It took a lot of learning on our side to understand how to create an engine that was ours because we built the engine, we designed and developed that engine. If you look historically, there was a lot of pain that we went through to get it right. Could there have been an easier route? Sure, but it wouldn't have been ours. The engine is authentically ours. Similarly, the engine that we started using in the Truck series is the one that we currently race in dirt midgets now, and it's a brilliant engine.

We learned a lot from that. In engineering, you're always learning, so whatever modality you're racing in, you're learning from what you're doing. For us, we had a different background in racing with open wheel racing. We were quite good at it and won championships and Indy 500s. The transition into NASCAR had to do with the viewership. It spoke cleanly to the Midwest and Southeast, and it was an area where we needed to be stronger. We develop and build a lot of cars in a lot of those areas, in Alabama, Indiana, and Texas. Speaking to those groups about our capabilities and our passion for American motorsports and candidly as an Americanized company, [how] we provide a lot of jobs, a lot of people work here, and we build a lot of cars.

PRI: You also have a sophisticated driver development program. How does that work?

Irving: Our driver development program started quite a while ago. It's important to be in the early stages of racing to try and find new talent and to try and help make sure that there is a Toyota path for drivers to try to get to the higher levels, whether that's racing in World of Outlaws, or Trucks, or Xfinity, or if you want to make it to Cup or go to run a GT4 or GT3 car.

Our driver development program has evolved from where we may have helped get them into the car, but now it's much more involved with "how do you race, why do you race, how do you communicate the racing, what do the teams need out of the driver, what are the driver's needs out of the teams?" We have a performance group that focuses on their health and safety to make sure that they're trained properly and they have the right heat tolerance training. We're going to Mexico, and there's a whole bunch of stuff on elevation training we've done.

PRI: Most drivers who are reading this interview right now are thinking the same question: How do I get into the Toyota driver development system?

Irving: It all depends...

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