NASCAR Stock Cars: Past, Present and Future

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NASCAR Stock Cars: Past, Present and Future

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed

Although it’s certainly true that the most hard-core of NASCAR fans must know what stock cars actually are, there is a huge gray area in which the term stock car all too often is synonymous with racing car. At its inception, stock cars were not at all racing cars, stock cars were stock cars and they could be made into racing cars with a very few number of small modifications.

The truth of the matter is that NASCAR car racing was built on the idea that people might like to see cars like the cars that they were driving be the ones on the race track. Truth be told, there weren’t even racetracks. So how, you might ask, has NASCAR come from being a car race without a race car or a race track to what it is today—a car lover’s and speed lover’s haven?!

The history seems long when considering how much has changed, but the history is actually very short. NASCAR’s roots were planted in post World War II America in a time when people had more than they had had in decades. There was once again time, money and energy available for general amusement. The first car races took place on the dirt tracks around fairgrounds. The cars were, then, truly stock cars. This means that they were the exact same version of the car that you’d see someone driving down the street. This idea was one of the founding ones of NASCAR, based on the inference that the general people would get most excited about seeing real cars out there racing each other. Looking back, the idea seems very all-American; anyone can be president and any car can make it onto the racetrack. Whether an all-American or an anti-American idea, the idea was highly successful and great crowds came out to see the first stock car races.

At the beginning, the cars had no special equipment; sometimes airplane harnesses were used as stand-in seatbelts for the sake of safety—but this was neither standard nor required for safety’s sake by the race organizers. The earliest concerns in these early races were for the car’s tires (racing went far beyond ‘normal wear and tear’) and the shocks of the car. Forever resourceful, the first decade of car racing was marked not by innovations in tires specific for racing, but in the inclusion of a trap door in the floorboards of the car so that the driver could pull the trap door open mid-track in order to see how much life was left in his tires. A far-cry from today’s technology and diagnostics team looking out for such things; tire wear is not a responsibility of today’s driver, unless he feels some difference in the way the car is handling, of course he will report it to the crew chief.

Like bike races, car racing is no longer just car racing. The ‘stock cars’ of today are not actually stock, at least not general stock. They’re stock specific to racers and NASCAR in particular. Cars in today’s NASCAR are so easily identified beside their street counterparts that even the most general of non-specialists can point out which one is which without knowing a single thing about race cars or about NASCAR. In the 21st century, the cars of NASCAR are only going to get fancier and more technologically ‘smart’. With today’s engineering possibilities and the increasingly stringent safety requirements put in place by NASCAR, the cars of NASCAR are only going to get better and better and further differentiate themselves from the cars we see on the street. Or maybe, just maybe, cars and racing have come full circle; the original races were raced with ‘regular’ cars—maybe regular cars will soon be modeled after racing cars…only time will tell.

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