NO CAMARO "FUNNYCAR" FOR NASCAR NATIONWIDE SERIES

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According to the Orlando Sentnel and Bangshift.com Chevrolet has told NASCAR that it will not submit its "iconic" Camaro for the horrendous "common-template" "FunnyCar of Tomorrow" treatment to race in the NASCAR Nationwide Series.

The New Bow-tie brigade doesn't want the already cartoonish Camaro to be further diluted and distorted into a "NASCAR" cartoon-car. "New GM" Racing's head honcho Mark Kent told the Orlando Sentnel's Steven Cole:

[W]e felt that by forcing the Camaro into the Nationwide templates that we were compromising the body lines of an iconic car. So at the end of the day we just could not get the Camaro in the Nationwide series to satisfy our requirements.

That's a laudable show of design integrity for "Government Motors."

[But does this mean that we'll never see a "Camaro" flopper in NHRA funny car competition?]

Too bad Ford didn't take the same stance in protecting the design integrity of its Mustang from the aesthetically-bankrupt butchers at NASCAR.

The hideous common-template "FunnyCar of Tomorrow" idea has destroyed what little was left of "Stock Car" racing.

Racing RWD "Pony Cars" in the Nationwide Series only really made sense if they were production-based.

However, sipping the COT Kool-Aid (tm), Mark Kent parroted the NASCAR talking point about "quest for very close competition" creating "the need to have templated bodies in that series." That's just wrong. It's amazing that production-based cars race competitively in series all over the world (even sometimes in the U.S.A.). And Mark Kent knows that. Perhaps he was just unwilling to acknowledge what millions of racing fans already know: that "the emperor has no clothes" when it comes to the weak justifications for NASCAR's spec-racer COT.

NASCAR lost the "groove" of what makes a stock car "stock" (and identifiable to the "Walter Mittys" in the stands) so long ago, it seems impossible for them to recover now.

Yet because of NASCAR's monopoly on racing venues through International Speedway Corporation (ISC), NASCAR's corporate sister, and the tight regulation of racing dates to non-ISC tracks, not to mention NASCAR's 800-lb gorilla dominance of the motorsports television market, it is virtually impossible to develop a viable competitor to NASCAR.

NASCAR's monopoly needs to be broken up under anti-trust laws and real production car racing returned to America's speedways.

Sadly, Chevrolet didn't completely tell "[t]he folks in the palace of pure thought down there in Daytona" to "step off." Instead, the GM Racing gang said they'd sticker-up their "NASCAR" with Impala decals.

They probably figure that few will object to faking up some FWD 'box into a cartoonish "COT."

However, Chevrolet's acquiescence to the COT concept merely delays the time when real, production-based stock car racing returns to America and the POX of the Common-template is eradicated.

But at least Chevrolet took an obvious "baby step" that Ford and Chrysler were seemingly too timid to take.