Fred Bowen's "The Score" column,
Friday, February 18, 2005, Washington Post

NASCAR: Not Your Father's Chevrolet

The Daytona 500, the Super Bowl of stock car races, is Sunday. I'm not much of a NASCAR fan, but I have to admit the cars are really cool.

The cars are called "stock cars" because in the old days drivers raced cars that you could find "in stock" at a car dealer. Now, a NASCAR racing car is very different from a regular car. The race cars at the Daytona 500 are built for speed -- they can go about 200 miles per hour -- not for driving kids to soccer practice. So race mechanics get rid of everything that won't help the car go faster.

For example, a NASCAR racing car doesn't have passenger seats. There's only one seat, specially made for the driver. The car does not have doors, so the driver has to climb in through an opening where the driver's side window would normally be. If it's a tight fit, the driver sometimes removes the steering wheel (that's right, it's detachable) to squeeze into the seat.

The cars also don't have horns, side-view mirrors, air conditioning or stereo systems. Those things don't help you win a race. Anyway, the driver is way too busy to listen to a favorite radio station.

The cars don't have front or back lights, either. Those things that look like headlights are stickers placed there to make a racing car look more like a regular car.

The driver doesn't turn a key to start the engine. The flip of a switch gets the motor running. In fact, cars have two ignition switches in case one doesn't work.

Because the engine is much more powerful than a regular car engine, NASCAR mechanics make lots of special, extra-strength engine parts that can withstand the pressure of high-speed racing. Even so, many of the engine parts are replaced after just one race because they wear out that quickly.

And NASCAR teams bring as many as six engines to a big race such as Daytona. The teams often use one engine to qualify for the race and a different engine in the actual race.

The cars have tires, of course, but they are not like the tires on your family car. Racing tires are much wider and do not have tread. (That allows as much rubber as possible to meet the road, and provides more traction.)

Is anything the same on a NASCAR race car and a regular car? Well, the front grill, roof, hood and the lid of the trunk (even though race cars don't have trunks) are similar to those on the cars you see on the street.

Oh, one more thing makes a NASCAR racing car different -- the price. A car racing in the Daytona 500 costs more than $100,000 to build.