NASCAR Goody's Dash Series Toyota Celica
Weird Car of the Day #502: 2001 NASCAR Goody's Dash Series Toyota Celica – Planting seeds
You're looking at Toyota's first factory-supported stock car racing entry, Toyota's first stock car championship-winning car, and one of the least-known bad-ass racing cars out there.
If you feel a front-drive 4-cylinder Japanese sports coupe morphing into a rear-drive V6-powered tube frame NASCAR racing car isn't a little weird, I can't help you.
If you don't think it's cool, I also can't help you.
Affectionately known as 'Buzz Series' cars, I promise you've never heard racing cars that sound like the Dash series cars did at full chatter. You can clearly make out the Huffman Celica at around the 50 second mark
For the uninitiated, stated most simply, short track-style race cars are made from chassis using square and round steel tubing that conforms to series regulations, plus an allowed engine, and—especially back in the old days—steel sheet metal bodywork on top.
Race teams, mostly volunteers, would bash into each other on track, then spend the entire next week fixing, repainting, and setting up their cars for the next weekend. (This is remarkably similar to what modern F1 teams do, with literally 200x less budget.)
You must also understand: for tens of thousands of Americans, Huffman was the man; he'd graduated from short tracks to Daytona, finding success along the way, proving it was possible for a small race team to compete at the highest levels.
I wanted to highlight that because when researching this car I came across several comments with a similar sentiment to this one from @travishanner9970 on YouTube:
Don't know how old you are, so I don't know how much of your dad's Dash career you remember, but here's the deal....your dad was a racing hero to a lot of us. I don't think anybody actually made a living running the Dash series, but to a lot of us, HE DID IT!!! He was a Saturday night short track guy that made it!!!! Racing at Daytona, Atlanta, Bristol, Homestead, etc. He proved that you didn't have to be rich, or 2nd generation, or anything like that. If you wanted it bad enough, you could do it. NASCAR needs to get back to that!!! I met your dad at St. Augustine Speedway, here in Florida. He was the coolest guy. He gave the impression the he thought he was the luckiest person on earth, because he got to race on the same tracks as the "Big boys", but still keeping the "short track" roots. That all being said, THANK YOU, for doing the shop resto, and hopefully the car, and taking us along for the ride.
For the sake of this article, I'm going to call the series the 'NASCAR Dash' series, Dash for short, but note that the sanctioning body had a few distinct eras. Initially, four-cylinder cars, including ones bodied to resemble imports, made up the bulk of the short track and road racing calendar.
In the late 1990s, V6 engines were allowed, and the lowest tier of NASCAR (but highest tier of the nation's weekly racing series) became an intersection where professional and amateur racers battled it out on track.
When Toyota wanted to go circle track racing, signing the reigning Dash series champion Robert Huffman for 2001 season to run a V6 Celica was the bridgehead that led to more than 600 wins (and counting) across NASCAR's top three divisions. Toyota joined Dash in, arguably, its heyday, with 18 races in the 2001 season, dropping to 14 races in 2002 and just eight rounds in 2003.
michael banovsky
