Cheeveer wrote:I was more thinking history and philosophy.
American stock car racing is its own entity. An American stock car has never been interchangeable with a European-style (or Australian) touring car. Stock car racing carved out its own discipline of motor racing, independent from the touring car racing that happened in Europe. That stock cars were built for ovals and touring cars for road courses is the most important aspect, obviously.
Talking about NASCAR while discussing "touring car racing" is futile, since there is no historical parallell.
When stock car racing began it involved racing cars that were either modified or unmodified versions of road cars.
When touring car racing began it also involved racing cars that were either modified or unmodified versions of road cars. I'm fairly certain you could have run a NASCAR-spec Hudson Hornet or something like that in a touring car race back in the day, presuming it had enough seats or doors.
Even the oval part isn't neccesarilly correct either. Something like Turismo Carretera is classified a stock car category, even though it has generally run road courses and some rally-type courses throughout its history. Then there's Stock Car Brasil, a category which runs entirely on road courses.
I do agree on them being their own entities tho, which I'd suggest may be a large part of why NASCAR is referred to as stock car racing and something like the BTCC is referred to as touring car or saloon car racing.
And there are other differences obviously. Many stock car categories don't even resemble road cars nowadays, though the big NASCAR series do have a tiny level of resemblance to their road cars, or at least no less then something like a V8 Supercar does now. I think also that the name suggests something slightly different - a stock car could really be any sort of road-going car (which would explain why there were sports cars in early NASCAR - for example, their first road course race was won by a Jaguar XK120, while Austin Healeys, MGs, Porsches and even a goddamn Morgan also took part) whereas a touring car I think originally meant a family car.
PTRACER wrote:
I would be interested to know the last time they used actual stripped down road cars for top level saloon car racing.
Maybe Supertouring? Some of the early V8 Supercars (back before they were actually called that) might have been stripped down road cars as well. Group A was definitely based off of road cars.
Cheeveer wrote:
When did the first homologation specials appear?
In Australia they appeared very early on, like Holden had the EH S4 in 1963 which was basically put out so they could race it, and by 1972 the outright contenders at Bathurst were all homologation specials which ended production car racing as a major form of competition in Australia.
