BRISTOL, Tenn. -- Jack Irving will tell you everything you want to know about this week's Toyota driver combine being held at California's Irwindale Speedway, and you might not realize the program is geared toward gauging the talent level of female competitors.
That is a good thing. Irving, the director of team and support services for Toyota Racing Development (TRD), is looking for ability and skill and aptitude and a host of things that have nothing to do with gender and everything to do with driving a race car very well and very fast.
But diversity is a focal point for Toyota's racing program, from the grassroots level up, and officials will tell you point-blank a push is being made not just to find talented youngsters and help them advance, but to find talented female youngsters and help them progress.
Six girls and two boys will take part in this week's combine, which started Monday with seat fitting and classroom training and will move to the Irwindale oval Tuesday and Wednesday.
"There will be a few people that will be there that have never been on a [paved] track or have very, very minimal experience, and then we'll have a couple of people that have a lot of experience [on pavement]," Irving said of the group.
"It should be a good test for all of them. They should all be similar [talent] level minus just kind of the [pavement] inexperience of a few of them."
Group practice sessions (25 laps at a time) will be staged all day Tuesday, while on Wednesday, the two groups of four competitors each will run two 75-lap races, topped off with a 50-lap race at the end of the day.
"You're looking for a certain amount of aggression, you're looking for car control, you're looking at how they communicate [what the car is doing]," Irving said.
"The environment won't be good. It will be Irwindale and they will have run a certain amount of laps the day before; it will be interesting because we are going to get them tired. We want to see how they react when they're tired.
"It's not a fair assessment because a lot of them haven't run 100, 150 laps, but at some point, 150 laps in 100-degree heat with a car temperature of 120 degrees will break them down. I will bet my life most of them aren't hydrated well. It will be interesting to see them dehydrated and run, which is a huge falloff, much bigger than people know."
Holley Hollan, a 16-year-old from Oklahoma, is one of the combine's participants. She has been racing since she was 5, and she currently competes on dirt in Midgets and the somewhat less powerful Micros. Both are demanding but exciting open-wheel vehicles.
That Toyota is providing an opportunity to allow drivers such as herself to showcase their talent, Hollan said, "is huge."
"I know even with my family [help] there's no way I would be able to run asphalt or be able to do these things without ... [Toyota's] support," she said. "Even just going from the dirt to asphalt, that's a tough transition anyway. I'm really lucky to be with Toyota in the dirt stuff, to be able to have these opportunities in the asphalt, because I know without them it wouldn't be possible."
Hollan has seen how the Toyota pipeline helped another Oklahoma native progress. Christopher Bell, a former dirt-track standout, competes for Joe Gibbs Racing in NASCAR's Xfinity Series and currently leads the points standings.
"It was always something I wanted to be a part of, especially seeing where it took Christopher," Hollan said of the Toyota relationship. "From the dirt, starting in the same thing that I started in, to where he is now. I definitely felt like with them looking for a girl too it was good timing."
Maria Cofer, a 19-year-old Californian, will join Hollan and the others at Irwindale. She has an extensive dirt background but is looking forward to making the move to pavement racing.
"If I could choose, a perfect world would be more pavement stuff because my big picture is to make it to NASCAR," Cofer said. "It definitely would be focused on more pavement. But at this point in my career, I am really open to whatever comes because I just want to be a race car driver. It doesn't matter to me what I'm in."
Cofer is a former Bay Cities Racing Association (BCRA) Dirt Midget Series champ and the first female to accomplish the feat.
"It's definitely a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Cofer said of the combine. "It's been amazing to work with TRD because they are so different and set apart from every different team out there.
"It's very unique and special, a super special thing to be a part of, and [I'm] super grateful I get to be a part of it."
Jesse Love, 13, and Tanner Carrick, 16, are the combine's two male competitors. The remainder of the lineup consists of Presley Truedson, 16; Jessica Dana, 23; Lexi Gay, 17; and Brittney Zamora, 18.
Dana is a former member of NASCAR's Drive for Diversity program, while Gay and Zamora currently race Late Models in the NASCAR Whelen All-American Series.
Irving is looking forward to seeing how the participants handle themselves over the course of the program, both on and off the track.
But finding that talent behind the wheel, no matter how raw it might be, is the goal.
"There are certain people when you are out on the track you can tell their car control is ridiculously good," he said. "Even if they don't know anything. ... There are certain things that are innate, that these kids have or don't have and you can kind of see that quickly.
"Once they are in the environment of people being around them and racing against people, that will completely change the dynamics."
Female drivers at NASCAR's top level have been few through the years. Danica Patrick was the most recent, bringing attention to stock car racing when she made the switch from open-wheel vehicles to the full-bodied cars. She finished with seven top-10s in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series, including a best of sixth at Atlanta Motor Speedway in 2014, before stepping down after this year's Daytona 500.
Patrick did manage one pole during her stay, qualifying No. 1 for the 2013 Daytona 500.
England's Katherine Legge, who mostly has raced IndyCars and sports cars, drove her first NASCAR stock car on an Xfinity road course recently, and she plans to race in one more road course this weekend when the Xfinity circuit travels to Elkhart, Wisconsin.
David Wilson, president of Toyota Racing Development, calls the push by Toyota "a concerted effort on the diversity front."
"We would love to find a young girl who has the ability," he said.
Kenny Bruce is a freelance writer who has been covering motorsports for more than 35 years. He is a three-time George Cunningham Writer of the Year Award winner and recipient of the Henry McLemore Award for continued excellence in journalism.