A Shift by NASCAR to Ease Body Politics

When NASCAR was a struggling stock car sanctioning body many years ago, the car manufacturers’ slogan was, “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.”

A Ford was a Ford. It looked like the one Dad drove, and the family rooted for every Ford in the race. And a Chevy was a Chevy. No doubt about the way it looked. Uncle Joe had one that looked exactly like the one Junior Johnson was racing.

Fans cheered for Ford, Chevy, Hudson and Chrysler the way football fans root for their college or high school teams.

A schoolteacher friend bought a Plymouth because that’s the car Richard Petty drove. The slogan was right. Petty won 27 races in 1967 and Plymouth sales blossomed. For some, it was almost a national tragedy when he announced in 1969 that he was switching to Ford.

Those days are long gone.

If you want to follow a specific car, or driver, in NASCAR today, you check out the color scheme, the sponsor’s name on the side panel or the car’s number.

You can’t tell a thing from the body styles. Bodies no longer look like Ford cars, Chevrolet cars, Dodge cars or Pontiac cars.

They all look like NASCAR cars.

That is because NASCAR has gone to a common body, using a common template -- something neither NASCAR nor the manufacturers like to hear. But what does “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday” mean when all the cars look alike?

All the questions about what it means will begin to be answered this weekend when Daytona SpeedWeeks gets underway with the Bud Shootout on Saturday night and front-row qualifying Sunday. The Daytona 500 officially opens the Winston Cup season Feb. 16.

It really shouldn’t matter much. Fans already refer to the DuPont car, the Viagra car, that brown (UPS) car. Drivers and crews never use names. It’s always the 28 car bumped the 6 car and the 24 car got caught up in it, while the 4 and the 8 broke away.

Drivers rarely change numbers, but changing manufacturers is almost as easy as changing toothpaste.

This year, for instance, Winston Cup champion Tony Stewart and the Joe Gibbs team have left Pontiac for Chevrolet. Jerry Nadeau and Mike Skinner went the opposite way, from Chevrolet to Pontiac. Rookie of the year Ryan Newman and Penske teammate Rusty Wallace switched from Ford to Dodge.

Bill Elliott, after 24 years of racing Fords, became a Dodge driver in 2001.

This year, teams will use common body templates, although John Darby, Winston Cup series director, insists there are many areas of differences.

“Common and identical are light years away,” Darby was quoted in Racer magazine. “I don’t think we ever will have identical cars.”

Eddie Wood, one of the famed Wood Brothers team owners, says the change will help teams that did not do well last season.

“We have all brand-new race cars due to the rule changes and, for us, that’s a good thing,” he said after testing the new Ford Taurus. “It cost a lot of money to do it, but I view it as being able to start over fresh and wipe out everything you think you were doing wrong -- whether you were or not -- and just start over brand new in 2003.”

Then there is Ken Schrader, who tuned up for Daytona by winning a Winston West race in Phoenix last Sunday. He says, “I stay out of all that stuff because [NASCAR’s] going to do whatever they want. Whatever they do, it’s going to be the same for all of us, but the same guys are going to run up front.”

Greg Zipadelli, crew chief on Stewart’s No. 20 car, said it’s too early to tell what might happen this season.

“I think we’re going to have to see,” he said after testing at Daytona and Las Vegas. “There are some differences. I think they’re a lot closer than what they were last year because each make was so different. It’s just going to take some races to see which race teams make the most of their new bodies. The way I look at it is that it will come down to teams’ decisions and drivers’ decisions, just because we’re all so equal.”

Testing at Daytona, Stewart said, didn’t prove a thing.

“I’ve always thought testing at Daytona was a waste of time anyway, unless you were a lower team looking for a sponsor and some fast laps during testing would help you out,” he said. “For a driver, you go out there and you shift three times. Once you leave pit lane you just go wide open and you leave it there.

“You get an out lap and two timed laps and then you bring it into the garage. That’s all we do for three days. I wouldn’t be surprised next year to see guys lobbying their teams to hire a driver to drive their car for three days so they could get a couple of extra days off. You’re just a passenger. The real work is being done by the engineers back in the garage.”

The move toward common -- or very similar -- bodies has been gradual, but it never quieted complaints from one manufacturer or another that NASCAR was favoring this model or that one.

“If it doesn’t do anything else, it should end all that complaining and lobbying and politicking like we have every other year,” said former Cup champion Bobby Labonte. “It would be nice if everybody was even and everybody could just go work on their cars and not have to worry about Dodge getting an extra half-inch kickout or Chevy getting an extra quarter-inch of spoiler or Ford getting bigger fenders. Hopefully, we can go without that this year and just worry about our race cars.”

Mike Skinner, who has switched from Chevrolet to Pontiac with Morgan-McClure Motorsports, would go even further.

“I think what NASCAR has done -- and my hat is off to them -- is get all these cars to where the measurements are pretty close to being the same,” he said. “Then one car doesn’t have to be a lot wider or narrower or taller or bigger spoiler or different valance heights.

“I think that’s all a bunch of malarkey. I think these cars ought to have the same spoilers, the same everything and let us work on the cars.”

After all the hashing and rehashing of what the new rules will do to racing, defending Daytona 500 winner Ward Burton observed: “The key is to keep your fenders on and stay out of trouble, whether you’re at Daytona or Rockingham the week after Daytona.”

In another major change, the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. canceled its driver-lucrative No Bull 5 program, under which a driver and a selected fan won $1 million each at specified races if the driver won.

Perhaps to soften that, RJR increased the season-ending payout from $14 million to $17 million, with the champion getting a minimum of $4.25 million, $500,000 more than last year.