2005 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Team Toyota Tundra 3D Lenticular Card! 🃏

Size: 7" x 4" ~ Nice shape, and the lenticular front still flips cleanly between its two images. They vary a little one to the next.

🏁 Team Tundra, Tougher With Every Race

It's a lenticular card. A lenticular just means there are two images printed underneath a ridged plastic lens, and they trade places as you tip the card in your hand. Here it's a pit stop: the white #5 Toyota Tundra getting serviced, crew hanging off both sides, "TEAM TUNDRA. Tougher with Every Race." running across the top and Toyota's truck-series web address along the bottom. The truck's nose is covered in decals - Goodyear on the tire, Simpson, Moog, Clevite, Comp Cams, Edelbrock, WIX and JE Pistons stacked up the fender, and a Sunoco sticker right on the bumper. The corner carries the NASCAR CRAFTSMAN TRUCK SERIES oval, which is the actual series this truck raced in.

🏎️ The #5 Truck

A white #5 Toyota Tundra in those years belonged to Bill Davis Racing and its driver Mike Skinner, who won NASCAR's very first truck series championship back in 1995, joined Bill Davis Racing partway through 2004 and debuted the #5 Tundra at Las Vegas that fall. In 2005 he put it on the pole seven times and won at Bristol and Richmond, and in 2006 he won again at Las Vegas.

🚛 Toyota Crashes the Truck Party

Toyota showed up in the Truck Series in 2004 running the Tundra, the first import manufacturer to race in modern-era NASCAR, and two years later, in 2006, Toyota took 12 wins and the manufacturers' championship - the first foreign automaker to win a manufacturers' title in any NASCAR series. Pretty good run for the new kid on the oval.

🏭 A Plant Bound for San Antonio

Flip the card and it turns into a trivia sheet - "TOYOTA IN AMERICA" - and one of the questions asks what truck Toyota would build "later this year" at its new San Antonio, Texas plant, aiming (so the card says) to help push capacity to 1.71 million cars and trucks built in North America by the end of 2006. The printed answer is Tundra, and that's exactly what happened: ground broke on that plant, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Texas, in October 2003, and the first Tundra - a 2007 model - rolled off the line on November 17, 2006, after roughly $1.28 billion went into building the place. Since the card phrases the plant as something still coming, it had to have been printed before that truck actually rolled out - so sometime in 2005 or 2006, ahead of the opening.

📊 The 386,000 Number

Another answer on the back claims Toyota supported 386,000 jobs in the U.S., with a footnote crediting a 2005 Center for Automotive Research study. That study's real - CAR put the figure at 386,300 jobs tied to the roughly $13.4 billion Toyota had invested here by 2003, counting direct manufacturing jobs, dealer jobs and jobs created through supplier spending. A promotional stat, sure, but not one they made up.

⛽ Sunoco on the Bumper

That Sunoco decal on the truck's nose isn't just there for looks - Sunoco started supplying NASCAR's fuel with the 2004 season, a ten-year deal that replaced Unocal 76. So the truck in this scene is running on fuel from the same partnership era the card itself belongs to.

🔧 Twenty Years Building Here

Last trivia answer on the back: "20 years, since 1985." That traces to NUMMI, the Toyota-GM joint plant in Fremont, California, which held its opening ceremony in April 1985, with Toyota-badged production - the Corolla FX - starting up the following year. That's the root of Toyota actually building cars on U.S. soil, and it's the number this card is counting from.