After the death of Dale Earnhardt in the 2001 Daytona 500, NASCAR started to work on a new car to make safety the number one priority. They also worked on the walls, putting up a foam “safer barrier” to make the impact of the cars hitting the wall diminish greatly. Thus the G-forces that hit the drivers would be significantly reduced and as a result not cause injury or death, which was common in NASCAR for its entire existence. And while most fans, myself included, agree that safety is truly important in stock car racing (they can now take hits at 180 mph head on to the wall, flip 8 times, and the driver not be injured at all), the result was something that really killed NASCAR. Which is ironic, because it has done so much for the safety aspect, thus reducing the death count to 0 in the last 10 years. The car, known as the Car of Tomorrow, or COT, was a truly ugly piece of machinery. NASCAR had since the 1980s been going further and further away from the Stock in Stock Car Auto Racing. Up until 2002, although the differences between the manufacturers was almost gone, the cars (from Ford and Chevrolet for example) had distinct differences that set them apart from one another. But in 2003 the cars all had the same body, minus some very small details such as the back window and the nose of the car. Read the rest of this entry »