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Originally Posted by 70 Forest Green Zee
Anyone who has watched NASCAR for as long as I have knows that it's not the same sport as it once was. Back in the 70's the cars basically used a stock production body and you could actually tell what kind of car a driver was driving. Very few rules back then, the body was required to match the body template for that particular manufacturer, a limit for the maximum cubic inches an engine could displace, and various safety mandates and that was it, anything else goes. The teams that spent the time, money, and the R&D to make their cars go faster were the teams that had winning cars as it should be.
Todays NASCAR there are so many rules and technicalities the best NASCAR teams in the world usually can't get their cars to pass tech inspection on the first try and that's due to NASCAR's obsession with all the cars being identically equal. Today, a car would fail a post race tech inspection if a bolt or nut was out of place by as little as a tenth of an inch and that's just plain ignorant on NASCARS part. Darell Waltrip really said it best... Let's build a car, inspect it, race it for 4 1/2 hours in 110 degree heat on a rough bumpy track, beating and banging with 40 other cars, and then inspect it again and see what moved!
NASCAR better take a good hard look in the stands and see how the popularity is falling, and take the sport back to its roots where the cars used factory parts and resembled factory cars, and get over the obsession that all the cars be exactly equal before it's too late. It will make for better, safer, and more interesting racing and the fan base will grow again. If they don't, I wouldn't be surprised if NASCAR doesn't exisist in another 10 to 15 years.
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Eh, it will never be stock cars like they had up through the 70's. That's when safety wasn't shoved down our throats. Totally different today. As much as I'd like to see it, that's just not going to happen. They can't take a production car today and make it safe enough without starting from scratch. It's not a reality anymore, and hasn't been for decades.
The reason they fail tech isn't because of Nascar's obsession with the rules, it's because the teams are pushing the rules. They all do it, only some get caught. Not much different in NHRA.