by Noah Joseph
The shutdown of Toyota's Formula One program should have resulted in a mass layoff of the team's personnel, right? Well it didn't. While some may have gone their separate ways, others have been hired; and despite the essential absence of an actual F1 program, Toyota Motorsport GmbH is still alive and keeping plenty busy.
Once the dust settled at the operation's Cologne headquarters, TMG remade itself into an engineering consulting business. The outfit that benefited from years of unprecedented investment from the world's largest automaker has been undertaking a variety of other tasks for new clients (in addition to specific roles it still plays for Toyota). Preparing test cars for Pirelli's new contract to supply F1 tires has been one, but according to a report in Autosport, TMG "has proved that F1 skills and technologies could be easily transfered to non-motorsport applications" as well.
As a result, TMG is closing what its own personnel describe as a "breakthrough year" that has taken it from the brink of disaster to a profitable business in its own right. Who would have figured?
