Well .. as has been said ..'there aint nothin stock about a stock car'
..still ..it would be cool if they made 'em from actual templates of the real cars.
Have the manufacturers do the 500 production runs of the 'Daytona' an such just to eke out a bit of an advantage for a year or so, like the old days.
That would get the makers back into it IMHO.
-GE aka Frank (they got the cage tech up to snuff now, they'd be safer than the old days for sure 
I remember that. It used to be another part of the racing game I enjoyed, because those cars actually
looked like stock cars, minus the stickers and funky paint jobs. A 1992 Ford T-bird had to be the same size and shape as the one in the showroom, and the same applied to the Monte's and Lumina's. Today? Blah, and blah again. They've made it so the manufacturers' don't have to worry about designing decent car aerodynamics themselves, The league more or less runs one template for every car now. A 2007 Charger cup car looks' nothing like my charger parked out in the driveway, Neither the front end shape, roofline, nothing. Fictional Jap-anime cars, all they are.
As far as the safety goes though, GE, I believe that they've been fairly safe for quite some time. In the '80's it wasn't uncommon to see 190-200 mph. crashes in which the driver got out and waved to the crowd. Bobby Allison's big crash, the one where he tore out 200 feet of the fence between the spectators' and the track, did leave him with a couple of broken bones, but that was one of the worst wrecks ever. It didn't kill him, though. Dale Earnhardt Sr's. fatal crash wasn't that hard at all. I've heard that there were several other causes of his death in that, but that the car should have kept him alive. I don't believe the older cars were any less safe than this COT abomination, in any event.
