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Actually, manufacturers' engineers told me privately they'd rather have at least all the big stickers - the red bowties and blue ovals - than the just-as-anonymous Gen 4 cars that didn't look like anything on the street either.
![sell cars in the crew wild run sell cars in the crew wild run](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hvlbqs78lxk/maxresdefault.jpg)
The uniform design and common templates convinced fans they were losing brand identification. Just as soon as Tony Stewart dubbed the COT "the flying brick" during testing in 2007, it was all over. This one, heralded the Car of Tomorrow, never had a chance with the public. This was in stark contrast to what was to come with Gen 4 in the '90s, when, for marketing purposes, Ford, for example, was allowed to field a prototype Taurus that looked virtually nothing like a street Taurus. So Petty was forced to make a milestone change to Chevrolet then later to Pontiac. NASCAR told Petty, "tough." It was up to the manufacturer to bring a design that would race well. In 1978, Dodge came out with a boxy street design, the Magnum, that was aerodynamically awful. This was the last era when you had to run the bodywork your manufacturer sold in showrooms.
#Sell cars in the crew wild run drivers
The cars were relatively safe - compared to some generations that would evolve, such as the aforementioned Gen 4 - because the drivers had so much room inside, and big steel bumpers dissipated energy, and strong roll cages held through horrific crashes. This was the era of Richard Petty's Dodge Charger that looked exactly like a street Dodge Charger, of David Pearson's Mercury Cougar that looked like one, of Cale Yarborough's spittin' image Oldsmobiles, and the rise - in those oafish-looking but great-handling Monte Carlos - of brash young Earnhardt and Darrell Waltrip. Yet in body design, the cars looked very much like their showroom namesakes. NASCAR had finally given up on stock chassis, and allowed modified ones for much better racing. But there are myriad other reasons I consider this the Greatest Generation of Cup cars. Now granted, this is where I came in, to cover NASCAR in 1974. All I know is, without the logos and a micrometer, you couldn't tell one make from another.Īnd it was in a Gen 4 car that Earnhardt died at Daytona in 2001, beginning NASCAR's slippage from peak popularity. In distorted retrospect, some fans think they had brand identification in Gen 4. He would beat on the new one and "rough it up" until it became aerodynamically dysfunctional, while the tougher old one motored on. Earnhardt used to say that if he could clone himself and race against himself in an old Monte Carlo from the 1970s versus a new Monte Carlo, he'd win in the old one every time. One little bump on a fender and a driver's day was done. One master NASCAR promoter told me at the time, "All our fans want inside a race car is a hero."īut Gen 4 cars were as aerodynamically sensitive as any prototype sports car ever fielded at Le Mans. Donald Miralle/Getty ImagesĪnd they were hungry for alternative sports stars - the plainspoken Dale Earnhardt on the one end of demographics, the polished Jeff Gordon on the other. The Gen 4 car coincided with NASCAR's greatest growth, but that doesn't mean the car was that good.
![sell cars in the crew wild run sell cars in the crew wild run](https://i.imgur.com/RcsARNC.jpg)
The new fans were just hungry for something different in sports, some beatin' and bangin' and risk-takin', regardless of design or brand identification. But NASCAR rose to the pinnacle of its popularity not because of those cars, but in spite of those cars. I know, I know: This period was NASCAR's steepest growth curve. Where previous cars at least bore the silhouettes of production cars, NASCAR in Gen 4 let manufacturers run wild, designing prototypes bearing virtually no resemblance to the street models they were named for. This was the era that stripped all semblance of "stock" from "stock car racing." The cars got completely out of hand. Here at the dawn of Gen 6, with a vast and unknown new day ahead, let's review the impacts of what NASCAR now designates in retrospect as Generations 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.īut let's not do it chronologically (yawn). "Gen 2" to that group, they'd have thought you meant one of Junior Johnson's mules. "Gen 1" to the boys who drove those cars, they'd have asked if she was good-looking. NASCAR's technological turn back toward - or at least in the general direction of - its roots, hopefully with more racy cars, even safer, that look like "stock cars" are supposed to, has a hip designation, the Generation 6 car.īut I can't help thinking that if you said Six Generations of NASCAR Cup cars ( click to enlarge). I keep hearing "Gen 6" this and "Gen 6" that, and I keep thinking of all those Gens that weren't called Gens.