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frustratedpilotHey.
In my pursuit of info about non-Legends quasi-jalopy motorsports, I got an education this weekend on the various flavors of "Late Model" race cars, which are basically NASCAR clone-oids and very popular around North America. Some of the leagues running these cars specify "perimeter" chassis (the same as all of NASCAR's three main circuits [Nextel Cup, Busch Grand Nat and Supertrucks]) or "offset" chassis (which have a lower center of gravity...but aren't all that great on courses that happen to have RIGHT turns) but most have the same size engines. Well, "Super" Late Model allows bigger motors than NASCAR, but I haven't seen too many leagues for those.
And of course, another determining characteristic on these cars is the material from which the bodies are constructed: Steel, or Aluminum, or Fiberglass, or "Downforce" (a combination of Aluminum and Fiberglass parts--which has been outlawed by many leagues).
Calling these things "Stock Cars" has lost all meaning. Back when I was born, the sport was already moving away from using street-legal cars that had minimal safety modifications done to them. In the Seventies, when I began following NASCAR as a kid, it had gotten to the procedure of taking a body and chassis from a production car factory and building a race car from that.
By the mid-Eighties, the standard perimeter chassis had emerged, and the bodies were now coming from companies that had nothing to do with Detroit's Big Three, with designs that only give lip service to the vehicles of the same names on the road. Now, only the engines are theoretically the same as those found on production cars...and I'm sure the ones made for NASCAR and ASALM have features that aren't street-legal and lack features meant FOR street-legal cars too.
Used to be that a manufacturer would be forced to build a thousand or so street-legal cars of a design for that design to be kosher for the racetrack. Could a street-legal car even be built from a steel NASCAR racer body now? Maybe I should ask Monster Garage.
FP
In my pursuit of info about non-Legends quasi-jalopy motorsports, I got an education this weekend on the various flavors of "Late Model" race cars, which are basically NASCAR clone-oids and very popular around North America. Some of the leagues running these cars specify "perimeter" chassis (the same as all of NASCAR's three main circuits [Nextel Cup, Busch Grand Nat and Supertrucks]) or "offset" chassis (which have a lower center of gravity...but aren't all that great on courses that happen to have RIGHT turns) but most have the same size engines. Well, "Super" Late Model allows bigger motors than NASCAR, but I haven't seen too many leagues for those.
And of course, another determining characteristic on these cars is the material from which the bodies are constructed: Steel, or Aluminum, or Fiberglass, or "Downforce" (a combination of Aluminum and Fiberglass parts--which has been outlawed by many leagues).
Calling these things "Stock Cars" has lost all meaning. Back when I was born, the sport was already moving away from using street-legal cars that had minimal safety modifications done to them. In the Seventies, when I began following NASCAR as a kid, it had gotten to the procedure of taking a body and chassis from a production car factory and building a race car from that.
By the mid-Eighties, the standard perimeter chassis had emerged, and the bodies were now coming from companies that had nothing to do with Detroit's Big Three, with designs that only give lip service to the vehicles of the same names on the road. Now, only the engines are theoretically the same as those found on production cars...and I'm sure the ones made for NASCAR and ASALM have features that aren't street-legal and lack features meant FOR street-legal cars too.
Used to be that a manufacturer would be forced to build a thousand or so street-legal cars of a design for that design to be kosher for the racetrack. Could a street-legal car even be built from a steel NASCAR racer body now? Maybe I should ask Monster Garage.
FP
