Autoblog

Reliability means different things in different situations:

* Racing teams what short-haul reliability under extreme conditions, and what could fail should be _quick_ to swap out. The car just needs to last for one race (heck, maybe even less, if it's modular enough), and it has the benefit of a team of ultracapable technicians and engineers (and the driver!) monitoring the hell out of it. All your Civic has is you and, if you remember to bring it in, the guys in the shop.

* Fleets want cars that are cheap and easy for low-skill staff to repair, and don't care much for reliability after the lease ends. Cost isn't an issue per unit as economies of scale can make an less reliable but cheap-to-fix car (like the Crown Vic) less expensive than generally more reliable model.

* Consumers wants whole-car reliability over the long haul, and they're especially fickle. They won't care that a car went 250,000km without an engine rebuild, just that it _needed) the rebuild. It'll also bug them if brakes wear quickly or warp, paint delaminates, pumps fail, etc (all relative non-issues to fleet buyers) and are really unforgiving of rattles and electronics problems. And they don't know anything about the car and might not maintain it well.

There's an old anecdote about how Honda lets powertrain engineers work on their F1 team first, before letting them anywhere near designing a Civic's engine. In the case of this truck, the engine needs to be easily field-serviceable and proven to run under race conditions. The iForce in the standard Tundra might be a more reliable choice _for a consumer_, but that's because a consumer truck engine is going to live a very different life, with a very different set of expectations, than this one will.

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The LS2 is lighter than the Toyota motor.

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^ Well said

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"It seems that a LS2 is kinda heavy for the Baja 500."
Pushrod engines tend to be significantly lighter than other engines in the same power range.
Reliability wise, the SBC has been around (in one incarnation or another) for the better part of 50 years, and has been used for racing ever since. There are more performance parts for GM engines that most other aftermarkets combined, which means the engine can be built up however you want it to be and as reliable as you could ever possibly desire. From what I could observe on their website, the crew of this team is quite experienced, they picked a GM engine for a reason.

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Did a little research, and I Was WRONG.
thanks for the great info!

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the LS-2 is a all aluminum engine and you can't get much lighter than that

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here is the link that I used to educate myself
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GM_LS_engine

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Correct, it's a tube frame chassis built by SPD Products, the only thing Toyota on this thing is the decal. I suspect the Chevy engine isn't all that much chevy either, since it's built by Kroyer Racing Engines.

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A modified LS2 small block is still a small block. The engine is a lot closer to what's in a production GM vehicle than that truck is to a Toyota truck.

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Or like ANY Nascar is its road-going equivalent.

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You: "Toyota thinks Consumers are too stupid to notice"


The Text:
"For the record, Toyota does not sponsor team TForce or its hopped-up PreRunner"

What part didn't you understand or are you too S... to notice?

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Doesn't matter whether Toyota sponsors the vehicle(s) or not. Todd's point is the same. The Toyota name is on the vehicle. I'm sure Toyota could yank the use of the name if they wanted or at least put out a small press release saying they have nothing to do with the team (once they found out Chevy is in there) but instead they know that Americans look at one level of logic and see "Toyota" winning the race (if that was the outcome.) Period.

Again, Todd's point still makes sense, more Toyota trucks will be sold if this won the race than Chevy trucks if this won the race. Which makes Toyota not feel disgraced that given a choice, any team (including the Toyota "sticker" team) picked a Chevy engine over a Toyota engine. In traditional Japan that would be not good, in world domination, money hungry, Toyota's Japan, apparently it doesn't matter.

But yes, one level of thinking could bring one to your conclusion, dejal.

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You're looking too deep into the title, there's a difference between a manufacturer sponsored team and a team using a certain manufacturer as their platform. Either way they can still be called a [INSERT MANUFACTURER] Team.

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