Mooresville NC resident Erma Kitten isn’t even a blip on the radar screen of NASCAR nation.  She’s at least 30 years senior to NASCAR’s Sprint Cup driver.  The only decal on her car identifies her as a handicapped driver.  Her blue hair and blu-blockers would make her stand out like a sore thumb at any NASCAR driver’s meeting.  The only similarity between this senior citizen and NASCAR is that she is the driver of a Toyota Camry.  But that similarity was more than enough to put Ms. Kitten on the NASCAR map.

On a shopping trip to the local Food Lion last week, Ms. Kitten put on her brakes to make a turn in the parking lot.  But instead of stopping, her accelerator stuck and Ms. Kitten took a wild ride right through the front of the Food Lion.  She careened through the checkout and straight down aisle 3 before making a hard stop in produce inches away from Joe Gibbs, owner of Toyota loyalist Joe Gibbs Racing.  Before helping Ms. Kitten from her totaled Camry, Gibbs got on the phone to his race team.  The message was simple:  ‘We need to get our hands on these Camrys.”

Not far from the Food Lion, Denny Hamlin took a deep breath to calm his nerves before he took his Camry to the track for practice.  With the recent news of defects in Toyotas accelerators, Hamlin was uneasy about the effect this problem could have on his race car and as a driver for Toyota, his season.  He started the engine, pulled off pit road and brought the car up to speed.  As he headed into turn one he slowly lifted his foot from the gas pedal.   He could feel the car decelerate and his heart sank right along with the speed.

“This is the 20^th Camry we’ve tried.  We were kind of hoping to be lucky enough to have one of those good ones with the accelerator that sticks.  This problem sure doesn’t seem as widespread as the liberal media wants you to believe,” said Butrid Huffy, Car Chief for the #11 FedEx Toyota as he tossed his stop watch to the ground.  “After the off season a driver sometimes is a little hesitant to really hammer down on that gas pedal.   A lot of people get gun shy before a big event.  I’m not too worried about it but boy it sure would have been nice if Toyota took care of that problem for us.”

Unfortunately for Huffy, Toyota has its hands full at the moment.  Following a recall last fall for vehicles with a floor mat problem that led to gas pedal entrapment, the company recently announced another recall for cars with a faulty accelerator pedal.  The worldwide total for recalled cars for Toyota is nearing 9 million vehicles.  After comments from US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood urging people to park their Toyotas the company’s stock price fell as much as 8%.

“What I wouldn’t give to get my hands on a couple or three of those recalled cars,” continued Huffy.  “We’re coming up on the Daytona 500.  The last thing in the world a guy needs is a gas pedal that lets up.  Floor mat problems, stuck accelerators, stick a brick on the damn thing if you have to.  As long as that damn pedal is on the floor and the rpm’s are climbing faster than my blood pressure I don’t see much of a problem.”

While the consumer division of Toyota is frantically trying to fix the problem and restore their image with the buying public, Toyota Racing has no plans to fix the accelerator problem in their NASCAR program but instead is looking at the option of removing the brakes entirely.

“If there is a silver lining to this whole problem it has to be the fact that our NASCAR teams will thrive,” said Toyota’s Director of NASCAR Operations Sam R. Eye.  “Can you imagine what Kyle Busch and Denny Hamlin going to do in cars that won’t slow down?  This is an exciting time for Toyota because it doesn’t stop there.  We’ve got a great guy like David Reutimann driving for………..dear God, what have we done?  We have to fix this problem before somebody gets hurt.”

Toyota’s racing program has come to the rescue of the company by providing for the installation of HANS devices in the defective cars for consumer safety.