NASCAR Nationwide Series

His 22-year-old son, Steve Wallace, just completed his third full season in the Nationwide Series and has shown considerable promise driving for Rusty Wallace Racing. But Rusty felt that something was missing in his program, so at the end of the 2009 season, he announced that the team would campaign Toyota Camrys in 2010.

“All the partners I’ve had in the past have all been good guys,” Wallace explains. “They’ve treated me good, but we needed something that was going to get our team better than it’s been. It was all in technology.

“When I went to Toyota and they showed me all their equipment – their ‘tools’ I call them – their seven-post machines, their pull down rigs, their shock absorber development, then all their sharing and the technicians that were available to help the teams to move forward, to be number one and get into Victory Lane, I came back and told the guys, ‘This absolutely far exceeds my expectations of what I thought TRD (Toyota Racing Development) was. It just blows me away. This is a no-brainer that we need to try to be with Toyota.’”

Equipped with his new Toyotas, Rusty expects Steve to take another step forward in 2010. This year, he finished a career-best seventh in the Nationwide Series driver standings with nine top-10 results and a best run of fifth at O’Reilly Raceway Park in Indianapolis. However, Steve heads into the upcoming season still looking for his first Nationwide Series race win.

“I do have a young driver, but I really do think my young driver is ready to get into Victory Lane now,” Rusty says. “The goals are set awful high, there’s no doubt about that, and Steven knows he’s ready for it. He’s excited about it.”

Rusty is excited about the fact that Steve’s No. 62 Camry has solid sponsorship support from 5-Hour Energy, and he points out that the car, driver and team owner will be hard to miss with all of the promotions planned for the team.

At the same time, Rusty is also working diligently to put together a second program. If he does it, he expects the driver to be Brendan Gaughan, who had eight top-10 results and a best result of second in May at Lowe’s Motor Speedway on his way to ninth in the final driver standings for the team in 2009.

“With Brendan, I’d say we’re probably 35 percent of the way there with his car being funded, but I’m not far enough along to pull the trigger and say we can go and do this,” says Rusty. “We continue to have meetings and our goal is to have a decision made by the end of December.”

Of course, as one of NASCAR’s most recognizable and popular personalities, Rusty has a role with Toyota beyond that of just a team owner. When he signed the deal for his team to run Toyotas, he also signed on to be a Toyota spokesperson.

It’s not much of a stretch for him, as he has been part of the Toyota family for several years already as owner of Rusty Wallace Toyota in Morristown, Tenn. Nevertheless, he plans to immerse himself as much as possible in all things Toyota.

“I’m really looking forward to this Toyota situation with me personally,” he says. “I want to get in there and learn the culture. I want to go to Japan. I want to see them. I want to go out to California and meet all the guys at TRD out there. I want to do a lot of traveling to understand the culture better, so I can do a better job for them and representing them.”

Between his roles as team owner and the new one as Toyota spokesperson, Wallace’s time is already pretty full. But he’s also keeping on his role as a television analyst for ABC and ESPN, which he’s done since his retirement as a Sprint Cup Series driver following the 2005 season.

“The TV stuff is real fun,” Rusty says. “The thing that’s not fun is the amount of hours. People ask me all the time, ‘Is it harder doing television or harder driving?’ I tell them, ‘When it’s going on, it’s harder driving. But when the race is over, the television stuff is harder.’ I often say we’re the first guys at the track and the last ones to leave.”

With ESPN as the television home for the Nationwide Series, how does Rusty handle the job of calling the action when his own team is involved?

“When I do my broadcasting, I just have to use 100 percent common sense,” he says. “Look, if our cars are running up front, we talk about who’s running up front. Generally, I’m not going to be the guy who jumps up and says, ‘Hey, look at my car.’ There are cases where I’m the one that’s supposed to do that if a question comes to me about it. Marty Reid or Jerry Punch or Andy Petree or Dale Jarrett, sometimes they’ll pick up those answers. Sometimes they’ll be the guys tooting the horn.

“But I also know that I’ve got to call what I see. If I see Steven doing something stupid, I’ve got to call it out. I can’t protect him. I can’t hide it. I’ve got a big job with ESPN and I’ve got to be straight up with it, because if I try to show favoritism, the fans can see right through that. But one thing I do show is emotion. The guys can tell when my car is out there and hauling!”

It’s obviously a lot of work for Wallace, but it is clearly a labor of love. He feels he has put together a good group of people to operate the race team when he needs to focus on his television responsibilities, but make no mistake, the buck stops with him. That was clear when the decision was made to move to Toyota, and he hopes that will again be made clear if the team progresses to the Sprint Cup Series in the future.

“I want to take my team to Cup in 2011,” says Rusty. “But it’s all about the money. It’s all about getting the support. This is going to be a key year, because people want to be involved with winners. They want to be involved with cars that run up front. And that’s one of the main reasons that I went with Toyota. Because Toyota is going to help me run up front.”