Need for Speed Racing Games

My guess is that it's Ford Street Racing (2006). You could switch cars, and give commands to block or do a multi-draft sequence. A video showing just two teams:

http://rcgldr.net/fsr/fsrcrw.wmv

Getting back to shift, I've already seen some "teams" online, mostly pairs of players with similar names taking turns ramming other cars in a race.

Well, Juiced 1 was team based too, and it was released on 2005.

The first I'm aware of in NFS history is Carbon (October 31, 2006).