All car museums are laid out the same way, I’ve been to enough of them to know. There’s always a big entranceway with a two-tiered display of a couple of dozen cars angled toward the visitor. The whole thing started when the depression-era bootleggers needed to run from the law. Criminals modified cars to outrun police and eventually got together to race their cars. They raced on sand, gravel, mud, and all sorts of conditions.
Today, NASCAR races are spread all across the country, including here in Charlotte, so there’s a block of asphalt from each track so visitors can feel the surface. The tracks are arranged from lowest to highest camber angle with a patch of floor at that angle to see if you can stand up straight. Not all tracks are a simple loop, locations like the Sonoma Raceway and Road America have up to 20 turns in them.
There are cars from the 1940s and up, and I was surprised that the first generation of race cars had functional doors and working headlamps. My problem with NASCAR is that it claims to be the largest stock car racing body in the World, but none of its cars are stock. Apart from a few cosmetic parts, they share nothing with the cars consumers see in the showroom. They used to be based on actual stock cars, but not anymore. Even Sally Carrera in Disney’s Cars movie nicknamed Lightning McQueen “stickers” for his fake head and tail lights.
Manufacturers like to “win on Sunday and sell on Monday,” but if the car I buy isn’t the car on the track, I’m not interested. I’d watch NASCAR only if the vehicles were truly stock; removal of equipment is allowed, but it must only be equipped with factory-available parts and be legally registered in the state where the race occurs. And manufacturers can’t just create a new model for the race, they must not only produce but sell with at least $1 of profit, 5,000 vehicles of the same model and powertrain for that car to qualify for any team to use. Then, the tracks are made of the same gravel as rural roads for a realistic feel.
There’s a simulator available, but why go fake if the real thing is available?
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