[Sirrotica]

Originally Posted by Nomadac
I miss watching NASCAR from the 60's to the mid 80's when the Pontiac's were real Pontiac bodies
I miss the good old days, always wondered why the older folks said this while I was growing up, now I know what they meant.


Anyone that thought that Cup cars were derived from stock showroom cars needs to read this article. The cars were going away from showroom cars in the mid 60s and the progression continues until today.

Street Legal TV: How long were stock style factory frames used in NASCAR?
Banjo Matthews (right) with Fireball Roberts. Image: Pontiac High Performance

Buz McKim: For the most part, stock bodies and frames were used in NASCAR until the 1967 Ford Fairlane, which was a unibody car. Beams were used to tie the front and rear subframes together which made it far safer and gave much more secure points to mount the roll cage. After that, things slowly evolved into rolling race chassis.
The stock front clip of the car was used into the early 1970’s but the remainder of the car was fabricated. Most race teams were doing their own rear frame clip which allowed them to put their springs in different locations to get them to work, and I don’t think NASCAR was real rigid on that sort of thing back then. It gave the builders a lot more flexibility. They could modify the A-Frame locations as well.
SLTV: Just from a visual point of view, it looks like the cars wore stock bodies well into the 1970′s. How long did stock cars utizile factory sheet metal?
Buz: Well, even up into the 1980’s they strongly resembled the factory version. If you look at the ’85 Thunderbird that Bill Elliot ran, or the ’86 Monte Carlo that guys like Earnhardt ran, the car still very much resembled the factory version. It was probably in the early ‘90’s that they really went away from looking like the factory car. At that point the only thing matching a stock factory body piece was the roof and the hood. Everything else was completely hand fabricated. In fact, until 2003, the hood, roof, and decklid were still required to be identical to their stock counterparts.
What really changed things body-wise was the ’83 T-Bird, because it was the beginning of the super aerodynamic cars we know of now. It’s a very round car with very few flat panels. Up until 1990 or so, teams would get “white” bodies from the manufacturers and use the quarter panels, roof, A-pillars, hood, and then fabricate everything else.
Interestingly enough, I have a quarter panel from one of the cars used in the 1990 movie, “Days of Thunder.” The gauge of the metal used in 1990 was far thicker than the cars that are run today, which are as thin as lunch meat wrappers! It’s just an example of technology moving forward.
Richard Petty working on a Torino for the 1970 year of NASCAR. It would never be used as Petty switched to back Plymouth before the end of 1969.

Up until when the “Car of Tomorrow” came in 2007, the cars were getting out of control. They were twisted, offset, and looked nothing like the factory version. One of the things NASCAR hoped to do with the “Car of Tomorrow” was to get it looking more like its factory counterpart. If you look at the Nationwide series at the new Challenger, it’s a car that quite closely resembles a stock Challenger body-wise. NASCAR hopes to continue that because one of their worries is that fan interest may have waned a bit due to the fact that the cars couldn’t be identified easily.
SLTV: When did the factory engine size restriction leave NASCAR? We recall seeing Dodge Chargers with “426cui” printed on the hood, but today the showroom version of most stock cars is a small fuel injected V6.
Buz: That all really came about around 1973 or 1974. It was kind of in conjunction with the oil crisis and that Detroit was starting to downsize their engines. So NASCAR, like in 1981 when they downsized their car to a 110-inch wheelbase, they were just in line with what Detroit was doing. It was standardized at 358 cubic inches and had a carburetor, and that’s what it is today.
SLTV: You mentioned that the 110-inch wheelbase was mandated in 1981. What was it before then?
Buz: Prior to 1981, I believe it was 115-inches, which is what most cars were then anyway. There was actually a range used at one point to allow for the different sizes of cars to fit into it since the wheelbase could not be altered from the factory dimension.

SLTV: When did the factory-style suspensions leave NASCAR? They’re all running coil springs in front now with truck arms and coil springs in the back.
Buz: Well, I can’t say for sure, but in the 1960’s you still had to use factory suspension, torsion bars, leaf springs, etc., but could add as many leaves as they wanted, move the shackles, etc. When GM went to coil springs, it really threw people off as they had no experience with rear coil springs. It gave them a lot more to play with as far as tuning goes. The Mopar guys complained quite a bit about trying to get torsion bars to work on road courses!

SLTV: When did purpose-built race chassis enter NASCAR?
Buz: Well, that really all started with Banjo Matthews, somewhere around 1970. He purchased a chassis jig from Ralph Moody and went out and made a ton of money building cars with it. Almost every car that won in the 1970′s had one of his chassis. I once asked Ralph Moody about it and he joked with me saying, “I did sell a jig to Banjo, but I didn’t sell him my good one!”
Why were Banjo’s chassis so popular? What set them apart from everyone else? Cars built by Matthews had won 262 of 362 NASCAR Winston Cup races from 1974-1985, including all 30 races in 1978, and four consecutive Winston Cup championships (1975-78). Statistics like that are no accident!
We found this over on LegendsOfNASCAR.com: “In 1963, [Matthews] left the driving to others, joining the Ford factory team building cars for Parnelli Jones, A. J. Foyt, Donnie Allison, Pete Hamilton and Bobby Isaac. When the factories pulled out, Banjo opened his own shop, and the legend began. He made a deal with John Holman of Holman-Moody, and built kit-type Fords in 1971.
“Matthews built the body and framework, and H-M put in the motors. After that, he built cars for Chevrolet, and then later for others from his own shop. Cars built by Matthews won 262 of 362 NASCAR Winston Cup races from 1974-1985, including all 30 races in 1978, and four consecutive Winston Cup championships (1975-78). On many occasions, cars built by Banjo Matthews comprised over half the field.”
“The basic construction of a car is not what wins races,” Matthews said in a 1980 interview. “It’s the team effort after the car leaves our facility that separates the winners and losers. We strive to build our cars as good for one customer as we do for another. The credit for their performance goes to the people who operate them. I get my kicks, and so do my employees, from how well cars that we have built perform and the satisfaction they bring to the customers. That’s all the recognition I care about.”
Darrel Waltrip's '86 Monte Carlo


Because of this, it’s easy to believe that the father of the modern stock car chassis – and maybe modern stock car racing itself – is none other than Banjo Matthews. After interviewing Buz McKim and learning more about Banjo Matthews, it would appear that innovators like Banjo, not NASCAR, are perhaps the reason NASCAR stock cars look like they do today.
It appears to have been a complete evolution of innovation within the confines of a racing series. People like Banjo, Smokey Yunick, and others who really could think outside the box and were set on building the fastest, safest, most innovative race cars they could within the confines of the rules, or more specifically, in the areas of the rules that were not clearly defined.
So, when it’s all said and done, the reason that “Stock Cars” no longer roll in NASCAR is a complex one, and certainly one that didn’t happen overnight. We love the racing we see on the track today, certainly, but the gearheads in us still pine for the day when stock cars wore real sheet metal and had a little more in common chassis-wise with their showroom counterpart. Sure, we now now that even those cars weren’t really “stock” anyway, but they sure looked cool.