Lee was very proud of his career--for good reason. I think he was remarkable in that he was an old school guy who was brilliant at developing relationships. He understood Toyota's culture. He brought JGR to Toyota....and then took over the engine program. He was truly a great man, and WE are not here without him.
TRD Appreciation thread. Get lost.
Thanks for asking. David Wilson (former TRD President) always talked about the five elements of winning.....In no particular order: 1) Aero, 2) Engine, 3) Set up, 4) Pit performance, 5) Race strategy. So that is winning, but in terms of performance......1) Aero is very good....lots of downforce without being too draggy......2) Tyler Gibbs (TRD President) mentioned early on this year that the last 18 months have been spent focusing on engine performance. I think OUR horsepower is at least as good as the other OEMs--maybe better. It's weird....we should be singing the praises of TRD for what they have achieved, but somehow, it gets mentioned around here like something that is bad or unfair. Stupid. 3) While OUR engine is obviously in good shape, I think OUR set ups based on OUR sim work is superior. Here's the thing.....the sim and the on track performance have to correlate, and I think OURS does better than the other OEMs. It was interesting that Coach mentioned Cole Pearn when Ty won. Did anybody really know that Cole was even with the team? He and Jazzy Jeff Curtis were masters at the sim game. I'm thinking that Cole is critical here either with the sim and/or set up based on the sim. David Wilson would always talk about how corner exit flattered horsepower. I think what you saw at COTA was Tyler's exceptional launch off of that last corner as much as any kind of horsepower advantage. What you saw last weekend in the last lap was probably more that Larson was slow (per Denny) as it was anything Tyler was doing...but again, corner exit. David mentioned that when he took over in 2013 at Pocono, and had to detune the motors because they were blowing right and left. I thought dear God, WE are going to get killed down that front straight--and yeah, WE got beat, but OUR corner exit was sound, so it wasn't that bad. Dominant performance is always going to be multi-factorial in my opinion....but in a nutshell, I think WE are very sound under the hood, but probably superior in our set ups based on a superior sim.
