As the opening event of the 2013 NASCAR Sprint cup season slowly and agonizingly drags itself into view (not unlike how a legless zombie might slowly tug itself on the ground as it pursues its latest dinner dish), so also begins the quiet exit-stage-left of the premier stock car racing organization’s greatest social experiment, otherwise infamously known as the Car Of Some Hideous Alternate Tomorrow.
2013, and more specifically the aforementioned upcoming Sprint Cup season reintroduces us to what NASCAR, only a short time ago, considered to be an utterly alien concept: A race car that might actually have at least a minor detail or two in common with what the automobile-purchasing plebes might buy at their local participating (insert name of nearby favorite-make car purveyor of choice here) dealer.
As I, the beleaguered author of this timeless (sorry, I meant to say “horrible”) opinion piece, gaze wistfully around yonder internet, I see an overwhelming amount of support for this momentous decision, made by the France cartel to return to the original model of NASCAR, pre-2007 (or 2008, the first full season of the COT/COSHAT), and use vehicle designs submitted by select automobile manufacturers…wait, sorry, oops, the few of you out there who might actually be reading this, and/or somehow managed to get even this far without clicking off this tab, you probably already know the “old” formula of how and where NASCAR secured the types of cars that would represent that erstwhile organization…since we’re all well-acquainted with the selection process, I’ll move on…okay, win on Sunday, sell on Monday…unless it’s a bank holiday…but wait, dealerships are open on most holidays…
Anyway, whatever the method might be for how the France cartel selects what cars will be allowed to run during a particular season is not important. What is important is that the life-altering choice to abandon the generic “Car Of Some Hideous Alternate Tomorrow” stands a fair chance of failing, the last gasp of a dying empire that may or may not change its fortunes as it attempts to maintain relevancy/right the ship in a lightning-quick, blindingly-short attention-span world, where everything has to be over and done with in 140 characters or less.
You see, although I have cracked jokes and written non-stop about the France cartel’s earlier plan to have a “spec” car, I consider it to be one of the most brilliant plans ever put forth by an automobile-based racing organization.
Let that sink in a moment.
Yes, you heard correctly, I’m dead serious, NASCAR actually did something right.
There’s a teeny, tiny, exiguous (okay, enough with the thesaurus) problem with that revelation, however. While NASCAR had an amazingly cunning plan as to what they should do to preserve their future, the problem is that they completely and utterly bungled the execution of said plan, in that they let a drunken, quadriplegic three-year-old with a bad case of the shakes (I forgot to mention that the designer also suffered from non-stop, complete snow blindness) pen the final design of the car. The COT was soooo hideous-looking, that it was uglier than a pair of bowling shoes. I think I have lusted more heavily for a brick I tripped over once compared to the non-love that I and countless others felt for this…this polished coprolite.
The issue is that NASCAR was correct in taking the lead into preserving their future, whatever other sins they might have committed cast aside (sorry, I don’t have enough numbers on my keypad to type out how many sins there are). The reason why I mention this, is that I feel that NASCAR stopped being relevant at the end of the 1997 season, and while popularity peaked around 2007-2008…I think the surge in popularity had more to do with aggressive marketing than anything to do with interest in what cars were being ran, or who was driving, or even what was going on out on the track.
Once new, incoming, and nontraditional fans (which amount to bored Star Trek fanatics) found out, unlike what the highlight reel showed on the evening news, there were, believe it or not, at times a few hundred laps between those spectacular crashes, which required that you watch the entire race to witness any potential carnage.
Why do I say NASCAR was no longer relevant at the end of the 1997 season?
The Thunderbird (or at least that version of the T-bird), used by all Ford drivers from the 1989 to the 1997 seasons, was no longer manufactured, having been unceremoniously shoved aside in favor of the new, far more aerodynamic Taurus. Ford had so destroyed the T-bird with shoddy, half-assed engineering (this car was supposed to be Ford’s version of the BMW…and it failed miserably), that when it was gone, only the mutants who really love these cars wept a bit when it vanished from store shelves.
Please be patient with me, I’m almost to the point of this story.
Why is this significant?
The Thunderbird was the last V8-powered, rear-wheel-drive car ever to ‘compete’ in NASCAR Sprint Cup competition (please disregard the Nationwide and Truck series, as nobody watches them anyway), the death of The Formula was finally complete, The Formula being cars that saw use were primarily RWD, front engine, and (mostly) V8’s.
And while I own a T-bird (1992 5.0 V8 car), I say right now that it has the capability of being one of the worst cars ever built, but at the same time, if one knows what to do with one concerning modifications, it’s possibly one of the better cars produced by Detroit out there…which is not saying much. However, given that nobody cares but maybe a few half-wits who like something different, there was absolutely zero fanfare concerning the loss of the final RWD car platform to be used in NASCAR competition.
Geeze, you’d think there would be a parade or something…but nope, the T-bird was pretty much hated to the point where nobody missed it when it was gone.
A note: The SS used by General Morons/Chevrolet/Government Motors in 2013 will not be discussed in this piece, as it’s a new release, and GM has screwed up almost every RWD sedan or coupe intro since the Impala/Caprice and Holden/Pontiac GTO/G8 fiasco.
And now we have arrived at “The Point”. The biggest problem facing NASCAR at the time that the Car of Tomorrow was released for public scrutiny is that unlike Formula 1, and Indycar racing, not to mention other forms of motorsport out there…The NASCAR Circus can only survive if it receives fresh meat from the auto manufacturers in the form of…bodies.
Car bodies, that is.
NASCAR is a weird version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” in that the series was formed around production-based automobiles, and has relied on the whims, tantrums, and outright crappy decisions of auto manufacturers throughout their entire existence in order to provide something of a canvas or a “body” for race teams to create their mighty 4-wheeled steeds to compete with.
If one thinks, for a moment, about the enormity of that last statement, and also thinks long and hard about what the “Big Three” have (not) produced in the way of sexy-looking cars since the high-water mark point of 1969-1970, one can only look on in horror when realization sets in, with what NASCAR, which is pretty much a race promoter above all else, has had to put up with from moronic automobile manufacturers for the thirty-eight or so years of appalling, tasteless, and utterly horrific automobiles from the design studios of America’s supposedly best and brightest in the auto biz.
Where it all truly began to go wrong was in 1973, and poorly-executed-and-implemented, Federally-mandated crash bumpers. Essentially regular cars with giant chrome-plated logs on either end, most everything from 1973-on, after the end of the ‘Aero’ era at the close of the 1970 season, and the transition years of 1971 and 1972, the ugliness in American automotive design, the implementation of poorly-performing smogger engines, (whoops, forgot the gas crunch and the great auto insurance company rape-and-pillage!) not to mention the appalling reliability that followed closely behind put serious dents in how excited Americans were about their cars. Meanwhile, pocket rockets that were truly a blast to drive were being unveiled by Europe…
I cannot find anyone from that era, from 1973-up, who was truly excited about the cars built after 1969-1970. There are of course differing opinions as to what went wrong…but this is called an ‘opinion’ piece for a reason, even if it’s a demonstrably bad opinion.
Domestic cars suffered from yes-men at the corporate level, the obsession with telling customers what they should or should not be driving…and when the Japanese came calling with the Accord and the Camry…and the ability of Japanese cars to easily last 200,000 miles and more, millions took that opportunity to vote with their dollars, and completely ignored the domestic offerings…to current day. To a lesser extent, the European contingent also did a number on the USA market, in that they produced some reeeeeally fun cars to drive, such as hatchbacks like the Volkswagen GTI, the various insane turbo cars, and the Audi Quattro…
I feel that NASCAR did their very best with what Detroit had to offer, but matters became much more difficult when 1988 rolled around, and General Morons, I mean General Motors finally ended almost their entire RWD lineup (the Camaro/Firebird and trucks being the lone holdouts), and front-wheel-drive poser cars were unleashed by GM as ‘race cars’, never mind that none of them were actually ‘racy’, nor did they sell very well, short of being standouts in the yawnfest rental car market. I can recall a lot of grumbling from 1988, as fans realized that the GM cars out on the track were nowhere even near ‘stock’ like the cars on the showroom floor.
This general malaise continued until 1997…when the last RWD car raced in the highest level of stock car racing…and took three of the top four spots in the Winston Cup for that year. Nobody lamented its passing, nor did they care that it was gone, as Ford ignored the teams that used the Thunderbird body for 9 consecutive years, as it fared poorly against the Grand Prix of Pontiac, and the Luminas and Monte Carlos of Chevrolet, having way too much frontal area, and having almost zero downforce in the rear…at least until someone realized you could tilt the body forward on the frame, and recapture some downforce. Ford, however, as pretty much every other manufacturer out there did as well (an exception can be held for GM, of course)…simply did not care, although it threatened the banhammer against the team or two that attempted to run the reportedly-faster Lincoln Mark 8 in place of the T-bird…
As the initial design phase of the COT rolled around, I think NASCAR realized that the domestic automakers could care less about the cars they produced, which in part might have led to their decision to allow Toyota into the gang, and also influenced the plan to push out the manufacturers all together, becoming a series like Formula 1, where there are fairly-standardized shapes and chassis design, and the ‘manufacturer’ is more of an engine supplier, which, to an extent, means a bit more freedom for the manufacturers themselves, as they can be functionally lazy about having to make a body suitable for NASCAR.
As time slowly marched by, and manufacturers went ‘aero’, in order to get better gas mileage (it sure wasn’t an attempt to make the cars look better), the art inherent in the older cars disappeared, as gelatinous blobs took the place of interesting shapes, with contrasting details such as grilles, chrome trim, distinctive body lines, fairly-perfect proportions, etc, etc, vanishing as well. What was left by the time the 2007 season rolled around were absolutely trippy shapes that nobody recognized, and RWD race cars that were based on FWD sedans that were the darling of the cheap rental set. There’s a paraphrased statement of mine from the aircraft industry, in that if it looks good, it will probably fly good…and while it’s a good thing that sexy-looking planes fly well, for some strange reason, auto designers, with a few exceptions (notably outside of the U.S. domestic market) have not been able to design cars that go fast and look sexy at the same time.
To close this out…I think NASCAR conned the manufacturers into going along with their plan for the COT, eliminating the “production-based” thorn in their side that had plagued them for almost four decades, but failed so badly in the execution in this plan that instead of redesigning the COT from a fresh, blank-slate design that might actually look like something that would make men kill their wives and mothers-in-law to own (well, most guys I know don’t need that much motivation to bump off mom-in-law, whoops), the France cartel went the ‘familiar’ route, and listened to ‘history’, never mind they have forgotten that the past gave us such horrific cars like the Citation, the Cimarron (make that pretty much every FWD GM car ever made), the LTD, the Cordoba, etc, etc.
I hope it works out okay, as the 2013 NASCAR fleet looks pretty aggressive (I think a two-door Fusion or a Fusion wagon would be the bomb), but I think it is going to take a heck of a lot of work to undo the damage, the unintended consequences wrought by both the domestic automakers in their arrogant refusal to give us the good stuff…and NASCAR’s complete botching of the Car Of Some Hideous Alternate Tomorrow.
To summarize, NASCAR and the participating auto manufacturers find themselves in between the proverbial, and mystical rock and a hard place, in that a renewed interest will be created in a sport that benefits everyone, but stands a good chance of being screwed up to the point, yet again, where nobody will benefit, and racing everywhere is dealt a near-mortal blow.
If at first you don’t succeed…call it the Car of Tomorrow.
