He admits he was “offered a job 100 percent on the back of my brother’s reputation.”
Wilson took that offer, flew back to New Jersey and resigned.
For the record, Wilson says — on paper — the decision he made in 1989 was the “stupidest professional decision I’ve ever made in my life.”
“I walked away from security,” said Wilson, who was only given $800 by Toyota to relocate to California.
But Wilson likes to make a point when he tells this story: “You should listen to your heart and listen to your gut.”
This is where we should pause and let you in on a secret. While Wilson loved the idea of being an engineer, it wasn’t his strong suit.
For one, while it should have taken him four years to get his degree, it wound up taking five.
“Just from an engineering theoretical perspective, I just wasn’t very good at it,” Wilson said. “I just wasn’t very intuitive. It didn’t come naturally. I really had to work at it.”
But the “wonderful thing” about joining the nascent TRD was that he “didn’t have a job description.”
While he started out “designing simple engine parts” in a drafting room, Wilson soon took the initiative at TRD, which was a “kind of unmolded lump of clay.”
One day he asked his boss if there was an employee handbook. There wasn’t. Wilson asked if he could write it?
“Yeah, go for it,” he was told.
“The most fun I’ve ever had over the past 30 years is to be a part of building something, not an engine, but building a company,” Wilson said.
As Wilson recounts his story, he sits in his California office on Nov. 14.
It had been eight days since the end of what he called in October a “gut-wrenching” season for Toyota in NASCAR.
“Toyota has been in the news cycle for too much this year,” Wilson told reporters at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. “I wouldn’t wish this on any of my competitors.”
This was after a summer spent trying to keep two-time Cup Series champion Kyle Busch under Toyota’s umbrella, only to lose him to Richard Childress Racing and Chevrolet.
Wilson said this on the day that Kurt Busch, in his first year with 23XI Racing, announced his full-time racing career was over, the result of a concussion suffered in a qualifying crash in July at Pocono Raceway.
Then there was the ongoing saga of Ty Gibbs. From his pit-road fight with Sam Mayer at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway, to his last-lap dumping of teammate Brandon Jones at the same track six months later to earn a race win.
But Wilson’s comments came weeks before the unexpected death of Coy Gibbs, JGR’s vice chairman and father to Ty, the night he won the Xfinity Series championship.
“You summed up what made 2022, for me, one of the absolute toughest seasons I can remember in my 33 years at TRD,” Wilson said. “Motorsports, it’s a given that the nature of it is up and down. You have some seasons that are great, some seasons that aren’t great. Usually, it’s the focus and the measurement on the yardstick is wins and losses. It’s ‘look at the box score.’ And for 2022, it was much deeper than that.”
Wilson said in some ways 2022 felt like “more than a year, it felt like a dog year, which is kind of equivalent of seven real years.”
Coy Gibbs’ tragic passing simply made last year “tough to swallow.”