Jarno Trulli and Toyota missed a golden opportunity to win the Bahrain Grand Prix yesterday and secure the team’s first victory in Formula One. The Italian was comfortably quickest in qualifying, regardless of fuel load, and set the race’s fastest lap so definitely had the raw pace to win.

Trulli’s speed was not translated into a victory and Toyota’s senior management are still waiting to see if their multibillion dollar investment in Formula One will ever pay dividends.

This weekend represented Toyota’s best chance yet to win a Grand Prix but they let themselves down with a crucial strategic mistake.

At Jarno Trulli’s first pitstop the team decided to fit the harder ‘prime’ tyres. The idea was to run a long second stint on the more durable rubber and keep a set of softs for the end. However the harder tyres were slower than expected in Bahrain and that, combined with Trulli’s heavy fuel load, pushed him back into the field at a rate of one second per lap. Jenson Button disappeared into the distance and the chance of victory was gone.

The prime tyres were always going to work best towards the end of the race with more rubber on the circuit, so Trulli was unable to get as much out of them as others did at the finish. If Toyota had stayed on softs until the final round of pitstops, Jarno would have finished ahead of Vettel and challenged Button strongly for the win.

Hindsight offers perfect vision so Toyota will go away from Bahrain with a few lessons learned for the future.

Looking back, Toyota could have gone even further to help Jarno win the Grand Prix.

The team did not predict just how fast Trulli would be in qualifying. He took pole position in a relatively light car but nailed such a great lap that he could have comfortably had more fuel on board. Jarno would still have qualified on the front row with enough juice to go longer than Vettel, so if Toyota had seen that coming he would have been in a great position for the win.

Toyota could also have used Timo Glock to better effect, but making the German their outright number two is probably not in their best interest right now.

Jarno was disappointed not to win but remained optimistic saying “I want to thank the team because they have done a very good job. Let’s fight again in the next race”.

Trulli might be positive about the future but opportunities like this don’t come around very often. Toyota had a race winning car yesterday but there is no guarantee they are going to have another one again this year.

Just about all of the teams, especially Ferrari and McLaren, will have new cars in Barcelona so Toyota may find that much of their advantage has been eroded. The battle at the front with Brawn and Red Bull is about to get a whole lot more complicated.

The pressure is continuing to grow on Toyota F1 because the team faces an uncertain time ahead. The global financial crisis, the future direction of the sport, and a distinct lack of results means that unbridled funding for the F1 programme will not continue forever. Toyota chew through more cash than any of their rivals and, despite cutting costs recently, have reportedly spent close to three billion dollars since entering Formula One. That is a monumental figure, even in the money-crazed world of Grand Prix racing, and the payback for that huge expenditure is just 11 podiums spread across 126 races.

At the start of the year Toyota’s Motorsport President, John Howett, said. “We need a strong season. If we have a weak season we have no future. Whether we have to win is difficult to say, but I think we feel we have to win.”

Howett added before the Bahrain Grand Prix that whilst he has the full support of the board in Japan, they were pushing extremely hard for the team’s first win.

In eight years Toyota has never looked like realising its true potential in F1, and there are any number of reasons why this might be the case.

Some have blamed the company’s decision to base its Grand Prix effort in Germany as opposed to England. Others blame interference from Japan that supposedly prevents people like Gustav Brunner and Mike Gascoyne from doing their job properly, and others have rightly pointed to the list of retiring drivers that have been on Toyota’s roster.

John Howett has a massive challenge on his hands to turn the fortunes of his team around.

The new regulations for 2009 have delivered Toyota their best chance of becoming Grand Prix winners and it would be a huge shame if the opportunity slips by.

The company is desperate to win in Formula One having conquered just about every other variety of four-wheeled motorsport in the world.

Toyota was incredibly successful in the World Rally Championship. They won seven world titles and totally dominated the early nineties. They were the first Japanese manufacturer to lead the sport, dragging Mitsubishi and Subaru in their wake. Toyota Team Europe was a force to reckon with.

Interestingly there are a few parallels between the company’s World Rally and Formula One campaigns.

Despite being one of the strongest teams in WRC history, Toyota scored just one win in their first ten years. It took them a very long time to get up and running, and even when the team did start achieving limited success in the 1980’s they could only do so in long distance endurance events where the brute horsepower and reliability of their car made up for its other deficiencies.

It took fifteen years for Toyota to become consistent front runners, but once they got the mix right they were unstoppable.

The team signed a young Spanish Rally Champion named Carlos Sainz, who later went on to score more points in the WRC than any other driver in history. His skill and youthful hunger combined perfectly with a new Celica GT4 in 1990 to win the World Championship. From then on Toyota was the benchmark in World Rally and won further titles with Juha Kankkunen and Didier Auriol at the wheel.

Had they not been caught cheating in 1995 and kicked out of the sport for a year, Toyota’s run of success would have continued unchallenged.

It took them a long time to become competitive in the WRC, but once Toyota started winning they never looked back.

Part of the reason why it took Toyota fifteen years to score regular wins was that Japan insisted on using the Celica as their rally car instead of the more appropriate Corolla. Just like the current F1 programme, the World Rally Team was a marketing exercise for Toyota, and they felt it was more important to sell the Celica as the company’s sports model.

That interference from Japan proved detrimental, which is something the Formula One team might be experiencing today.

The rally team, headed by Ove Andersson, worked around the obstacle and asked Toyota to develop a new Celica that would be easier to homologate for the WRC. When the Japanese obliged the car was transformed into a regular winner.

It took years of development, open ended assistance from head office, and a great young driver hungry for success, but Toyota eventually broke through in the WRC and became multiple champions.

John Howett will be trying to being together those same ingredients to let history repeat for the company in Formula One.

Toyota can then let out a 3 billion dollar sigh of relief.