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I'm Mike Sweers.
I'm Mike Jarboe.
I'm Kyle Steincamp.
I'm Kam Pok.
I'm Jakin Wilson.
I'm DJ Quint.
And I love trucks.
I love competition.
I love my job.
I like taking it to the max.
I love performance.
And I love the challenge.
♪♪
SWEERS: I realized I was a truck guy when I learned how to drive on a truck.
I'm a farm boy, so you grow up driving trucks,
you learn to drive trucks and it turns into
being a work tool, to
being one of those items of, "what can you do with a truck?"
outside of hauling hay around.
JARBOE: I've done some general 4x4ing and off-roading with
my friends with my trucks.
That was a whole different level when I came to Toyota
to get an opportunity to be part of
the Toyota PPI off-road racing program.
STEINCAMP: I did not have any previous rally experience.
Similar to some other members I'd seen it on TV
but, I'd never actually done anything like this until I joined the team.
Your first opportunity to have a road in front of you with no speed limit.
It was very exciting , but also a little bit scary.
WILSON: I was around cars and the automobile industry my whole life.
Finally get my driver's license at 16, I could then drive cars myself
and then start modifying cars and trucks, that's where the passion began.
Shortly after that, scrapped up enough money to start racing
vehicles and start modifying vehicles.
QUINT: I've had the passion for motorsports from the very beginning.
Majority of my childhood was spent begging my dad for a
go-kart to not necessarily race, but just to drive anything.
♪♪
SWEERS: Creating a product for our customers,
you have to have passion behind it.
And the passion comes from being a truck guy. So,
I'm Chief Engineer for the truck
but I'm not just a chief engineer for a truck,
I'm a customer.
And I want to build a truck that I want to drive.
STEINCAMP: The rally team started about 2007 or 2008
with a small group, one car,
and a group of people who are just really passionate
about motorsports, cars, and wanted to go try some rally racing.
CO-DRIVER: Go! Start, 120, left, five-long.
♪♪
STEINCAMP: In terms of the prototype testing that we can do with the rally team,
it, kinda, can come in at all levels.
We have done some testing for parts that are already in production
all the way to testing new materials that can go onto future models.
Specifically, some of it was TRD suspension components.
We've definitely done some testing for that.
And then some of the other stuff, future models...
...maybe I shouldn't talk about.
POK: My job as a vehicle evaluator
for developing the car's driv- ability or calibration
we need to have a margin of skill when we're driving these prototype cars
because we need to be able to feel, like, little change.
I try to use this race car to develop that kind of skill
so I practice that discipline a lot on vehicle control
using it in drift events or open track days.
QUINT: So the motorsports team absolutely translates to my job and to our products.
A lot of times we're kept in a somewhat narrow band.
You can change something, but you gotta keep it small.
With the motorsports team, there's no restraint, relatively speaking.
We're already driving the car as hard as our own internal
regulations or government regulations require us,
but it's still nowhere near as hard as we're pushing this vehicle on the track.
You get a ton of experience at a super high level,
way more than you would actually get at work and
I'm somebody who actually gets to do it for work.
I do things that, maybe, other people don't even have a license to do
and it's still kind of simple, because...
...we race.
♪♪
SWEERS: Part of the reason we race is to prove out.
We can insure that the dur- ability of the components,
the reliability of the truck is there,
in a atmosphere that's perfectly not a factory type atmosphere
or a normal customer's usage.
JARBOE: Man and machine against the desert.
It's like the ultimate test of reliability, durability,
and it shows the quality of our product.
So for me, the competition and the racing
that's what hooked me.
Definitely, all people who make cars should like driving cars.
Because if you don't like driving the car, then you're not going to make a good car.
WILSON: It's a blend of taking the professional and the personal passion together.
You know, one of the points with TRD Pros is, we push the vehicle
sometimes more than even our customers would do, and
knowing the vehicle's limits is so important and pushing them to the limit is so important
so that we don't have any issue out in the field.
We're all a bunch of TRD enthusiasts and we're trying to make the best product we can
for our fellow TRD enthusiasts.
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