NASCAR has always prided itself on being a stock car racing series. If we had to define the term ‘stock’, it would mean that the cars used were all standard vehicles with no enhancements or upgrades. This has always been the case in the last 75 years of the racing series. In essence, all the cars are relatively equal in terms of speed, and there are no upgrades that could give one team an advantage.

However, it appears that former NASCAR driver Geoff Bodine is not a big fan of this. According to him, this kind of system was detrimental to the stock car racing giants.

Is NASCAR that bad in terms of stamping out innovation?

As per Geoff Bodine, the officials tend to get a little nitpicky. In a sense, if certain bits and bobs are not in the right place, they are noted, and the teams get fined. Geoff Bodine told Autoweek, “You can change a little bit but not much, and to us older guys, that’s ruined racing. We always liked to be innovative. I always tried to design something better. Now, NASCAR might outlaw it, which they did a lot, but that was the fun part of racing back then. You could try to make something better. You can’t do it today.”

He acknowledged that the checks are so thorough that the cars are taken apart just to see if even the tiniest thing looks out of place. Woe betides any team or driver who ends up on the wrong side of NASCAR law, but Bodine dubbed it an ‘overkill’.

All of this was probably triggered when big businesses began taking an interest back in the 1980s. Geoff Bodine further revealed that before all of this, drivers didn’t receive salaries but earned a percentage of their winnings. The winnings used to be split between the team owner and the driver.

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In light of the influx of sponsors, drivers now receive salaries, and it soon gave rise to aggressive driving. Previously, drivers used to just bump each other to get past. However, since they were guaranteed a salary, the bumping was upgraded to wrecking.

When the Next Gen cars debuted, officials got even stricter

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In 2022, the Gen 7 cars finally broke cover and were put through their paces. Along with that came a brand new set of technical regulations, which were much tighter than usual. Especially when officials introduced a tier system of penalties depending on the severity of the offense, the newly rebranded Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing team found out how severe the penalties were the hard way.

Geoff Bodine does not like the over-regulation of the sport and believes that it robs the fun out of the sport. Unfortunately, it looks like there is no chance for any leniency any time soon. In other words, the NASCAR Cup Series teams will have to make do with extracting as much performance as possible without tweaking the cars too much. This is a far cry from the likes of Formula One, where there is a technological race running parallel to the actual on-track racing.

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F1’s unintended consequence is that it is difficult for all teams to be competitive on the race track. At least NASCAR has the parity to give it a leg up on its open-wheel rival. This is because the racing is a lot closer and the series is a lot more unpredictable. How else did we manage to have 19 different race winners in the 2022 Cup season? However, for Bodine, this is not good enough because he feels that the sport should experience some form of technological race.