When NASCAR mattered.....

The current issue of Hot Rod magazine has an article titled "When Nascar mattered" and it has great photos of drivers and race cars from the '50's through the '80's. The article laments how people are losing interest in the sport. The reason is this-all the cars look like a Honda Accord with Hot Wheel decals on them. Even if the announcer says so and so in 3rd place is driving a Ford or whatever, it doesn't register. When it started it was Stock Car Racing-what you could buy at your local dealer. That's where the slogan "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday." Came from. I grew up in the '60's and '70's and went to many races with my dad. Even though my dad was a die-hard GM man, we cheered for Richard Petty in his Charger and David Pearson in the Wood Brothers Mercury as hard as we did for Cale Yarborough in his Monte Carlo. It was cool because you could buy a Charger with a Hemi, or a Torino with a 429, or a Chevelle or Monte Carlo with a 454. ( OK, that's not a 427, but it's still a Rat Motor.) Even AMC had modest success with the slippery 1974 and later Matador coupe. Even after the big-blocks were outlawed, it was still cool. Richard Petty ran his 1974 Charger and kept winning ( The bodystyle was the same since 1971 ) until it was outlawed after 1979. The rules said bodystyles couldn't be over 5 years old. I remember the Chevy, Ford and Dodge guys all bitching when King Richard and a couple others fielded Oldsmobile Cutlasses. They did this because the 1976-77 Cutlass, with it's sloped front end and fastback rear window was way more aerodynamic than the flat-faced front end and square rear window of the 1975-77 Monte Carlo, as well as the square formal rear windowed Dodge Magnums, Chrysler Cordobas and Mercury Cougars and Montegos. The gripe was over the fact that Petty and the others were running Chevy engines in the Olds bodys. The other racers demanded that Petty and the others be forced to run 350 Olds engines, which of course would not have been nearly as powerful as the Chevys and would have negated the extra speed gained by the more aerodynamic body. Petty and his lawyers argued that they should be allowed to run any GM engine in any GM body, that Nascar wasn't restricting ( other than the 360 cubic inch limit ) what Ford engine could be run in Fords and Mercurys or what Chrysler engine could be run in Dodges and Plymouths. NASCAR ruled, correctly, that since GM was playing musical engines with every car line because of smog laws-i.e. you could get a 350 Chevy or a 403 Olds in a Pontiac Firebird if it had California or High-Altitude emissions, and since the 231 inch Buick V6 and the 305 and 350 Chevy V8 engines were offered in just about every GM model sold to the public, Petty and the other teams could run any GM engine in any GM body. The Cutlasses kicked butt. In fact, the last Daytona 500 Richard won was in a Cutlass!  Even in the '80's the Stock car spirit remained. You could buy a Monte Carlo SS with a V8 and the Aero front end at your local dealer,just like Dale Earnhardt drove, or a Ford Thunderbird with a V8 like Bill Elliot won the championship in. I really think NASCAR was killed about 1992 when the GM "G" bodys were outlawed ( Most of them ended in 1987, so the 5 yr old rule applied ). I don't understand for the life of me why the race teams didn't go with Camaros, Firebirds and Mustangs, which besides the T-Bird, were about the only V8, rear-wheel drive cars left in production. Instead, and NASCAR allowed it, they got completely away from their roots of production cars and- took a plastic body replica of four-cylinder, front-wheel drive econoboxes like the Lumina and the Taurus and put them on a tube chassis using 1965 technology. This is when they lost it. All the cars looked alike, and they had nothing, absolutely nothing in common with production cars other than they had 4 wheels and ran on gasoline. Come on guys-no overhead cams, no roller cams, no fuel injection?  When Toyota wanted to play, they couldn't run their production V8 out of the truck and Lexus line, they had to actually build a one-off pushrod V8-basically a Small-block Chevy clone. Chrysler couldn't run the new 5.7 liter Hemi, they had to run the old "LA" Small Block that dates back to 1967. Ford couldn't run their 5.4 liter modular OHC V8 , no they're running the 351 Windsor which dates back to 1969, with "Cleveland" style heads that have been out of prouction since 1974!! The dominant Chevys aren't the LS motors on the cover of every buff magazine; their the same old-school small-block that's been around since 1955!!.  The fuel injection their using for 2012 is a glorified carburator. It's a 4-barrel Holley throttle body that bolts onto an Edelbrock or Dart manifold and can use existing restrictor plates. Yeah, that's high-tech. Meanwhile, GM,& Ford  have been using Port Injection since 1985. There's only one way to bring Nascar back to prominence and that's to run the new Camaro, Mustang and Challengers with their production engines. That will generate some excitement and brand recognition. And allow to Toyota to run a Lexus with their best cammer V8-fair competition. But it won't happen, that would be too easy. Mastermind