NASCAR has had one guiding principle throughout its 77-year history: keep racing. Fuel crisis? Keep racing. Driver strike? Keep racing. Manufacturers pull out? Keep racing. A legend dies at Daytona? Keep racing. Wars, droughts, earthquakes, plane crashes… whatever arises, NASCAR keeps racing.
And right now, that means General Motors is campaigning the Camaro body in NASCAR Cup, even though the muscle car left production back in December 2023. About the only change that’s apparent on the track is that the Camaro branding on the rear bumper has been replaced by “Chevrolet” lettering. This, however, is not the first time NASCAR has faced the problem of not having current cars to race. Let’s travel back in time… one decade… two decades… three decades… all the way back 50 years ago to 1975.
Back in the 1970s, Richard Petty was easily the most popular driver in stock car racing. And his Petty blue and STP red Dodge Charger was the most identifiable car in the sport. The problem though was that the 1975 Charger sucked.
Richard Petty drove the 1974 Dodge Charger up through the 1977 season. He won three Winston Cup championships with his cars wearing this legendary livery. This shot is from 1975 when won 13 races and his second straight championship.
At the time, NASCAR race cars still ran more-stock-than-not sheetmetal. And Petty had the third-generation (1971 to 1974) Charger working great as a racer. The nose was blunt but low, the tail was sloped which directed air onto the rear spoiler for downforce and stability. And the third-gen chassis itself was very much the same as the Chrysler products Petty Enterprises had been running and perfected since the 1960s. Petty won ten races during 1974 and beat out Cale Yarborough for his fifth Grand National and Winston Cup championship.
But the fourth-generation 1975 Charger, nearly identical to the Chrysler Cordoba, threw all that away with a new boxier profile including a severe formal roof that was hopeless. So, the Petty team did the only reasonable thing it could, and kept running the 1974 Charger. It paid off in 13 wins during the 1975 season and his sixth championship.
The 1975 Dodge Charger SE wasn’t going to be a good NASCAR race car.
Still, the 1974 Charger was in its dotage and only had one more year of Winston Cup eligibility according to NASCAR’s existing rules. Petty could run the ’74 during 1976, but after that he’d have to find new sheet metal. Instead, after three more wins in 1976, a second-place finish in the points, and once again being named NASCAR’s most popular driver in a fan vote, NASCAR changed the rules.
The three-previous model year rule for Winston Cup was changed to four for 1977 and therefore Petty could run the ’74 Charger for one more year. The explanation was that it was a cost saving measure. But also, NASCAR wasn’t about to let its marquee attraction suffer with the ’75 to ’77 Charger body style. Petty took another five wins and finished second again. But the ’74 Charger was done.
For 1978 Petty moved over to the new Dodge Magnum – basically a ’75 Charger with a new semi-sloping nose. By the first race of 1978, however, Petty was unhappy with the Magnum. “I’m disappointed,” Petty told The New York Times during preparations for the January road course race at Riverside in California. “So far the new car has been going fair to middlin,’ mostly fair. It ain’t got to the middlin’ stage yet.”
Petty qualified for the 1978 Daytona 500 sixth in the Magnum but crashed out on the 60th lap. And his struggles with the Magnum only got worse. “It just wasn’t possible to get the Dodge Magnum consistently competitive with some of the other cars under the current NASCAR rules,” said Petty quoted by Greg Fielden in his Forty Years of Stock Car Racing book series. “We tried everything we could possibly think of. Even though there have been some improvements from the first of the year, everyone else is going quicker too.” So, in August, Petty moved over to Chevrolets.
Petty Enterprises at Riverside in 1978 unloading the Dodge Magnum to profound disappointment.
There was a good reason why everyone else was going faster during 1978. Before the start of the season, NASCAR approved the use of the Chevrolet LM1 small-block V-8 for use in Buick, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac body shells. The LM1 wasn’t that special – it was the base engine in the 1978 Corvette and Camaro Z/28 – but it was a 350-cubic inch Chevy small-block and dang near every American working in a service station knew how to make power with the Chevy small-block. And it soon became obvious that the killer setup for NASCAR speedway races was going to be the 1976 and 1977 Oldsmobile Cutlass models with a sloping front end and near-fastback rear window.
In fact the Cutlasses were so popular that they shoved aside most of the competition for three years – 1978 through 1980. That was despite the fact that the Cutlass (and all of GM’s “A-Body” intermediates) had been downsized for 1978 and NASCAR looked an awful lot like a used car race during those years. Richard Petty won the Daytona 500 in 1979 in an Olds after Cale Yarborough and Donnie Allison crashed their Oldsmobiles on the last lap while led. And Petty took his seventh championship during 1979 driving a mix of Cutlasses on the superspeedways and Chevrolet Monte Carlos on the shorter tracks (the longer wheelbase Montes handled better). Out of 40 entries in the 1980 Daytona 500, 23 were 1977 Oldsmobiles.
Then NASCAR switched to the new smaller cars for 1981 and chaos ensued. For a short while. The racing never stopped.
Today’s NASCAR doesn’t depend on stock sheetmetal and the manufacturers – Ford, GM and Toyota – are knitted closely to the sanctioning body and its rule making. There’s no way that NASCAR will let something as piddling as the lack of current Camaro production keep Chevrolet off the grid. And for at least the next few years Chevy will keep running the Camaro body in Cup.
“Chevrolet will continue to race the Camaro that is approved in the NASCAR Cup and Xfinity Series,” GM Racing’s Trevor Thompkins told R&T. “We remain committed to NASCAR just as we have been for 76 years. The cars retain ZL1 badging in the Cup series and SS badging in the Xfinity series. Across all the series where we race, we periodically adjust the balance of the car model and the Chevrolet brand. In addition, we use racing across all series, including NASCAR, as a way to promote the full Chevrolet line-up.”
The Camaro isn’t coming off the assembly line anymore, but the race version will still help sell Traxes and Blazers and Colorados and Silverados.
There simply isn’t a good alternative in the current Chevrolet lineup. The Corvette would be an awkward Cup car, and it’s tough to imagine a Traverse or Tahoe being pretzeled into a stock car shape. Maybe GM could have switched to a Cadillac, since the CT4 and CT5 are at least cars and not SUVs. But Cadillac has committed itself to endurance racing and is preparing for a move into Formula One. The Camaro may not be current, but it’s still a beloved Chevy.
But, at some point, NASCAR is going to confront the dominance of crossover SUVs in the vehicle market. And the future may look something like the Chevrolet Blazer EV.R displayed at Daytona during this 500 week.
“While we will continue to race our proven and winning V-8 technology in NASCAR for years to come, we continually look for ways to improve the combination of power, durability, and efficiency to transfer learnings from the racetrack to the showroom, especially as we bolster Chevy’s consumer EV lineup,” explained Eric Warren, executive director, global motorsports competition for General Motors in a press release.
The Chevrolet Blazer EV.R is all-electric, but built using the current NASCAR chassis.
Yes, the Blazer EV.R is an all-electric race machine with 1300 horsepower from three electric motors. Even more importantly for the immediate future, however, it’s an SUV body style fitted to a modified version of the current NASCAR Next Gen chassis. “This program was a great opportunity with NASCAR to design a new crossover utility vehicle body and bring forward design elements from our Blazer EV SS,” said Phil Zak, executive director for Chevrolet Global Design in that same press release. “The EV.R prototype offers lower and wider proportions and was designed with aerodynamics and performance in mind.”
It’s possible (if not likely) that the future of NASCAR racing looks something like the Blazer EV.R with that tall rear wing supplying the downforce necessary for racing stability. Whether that future is powered by V-8 engines, electric motors, or sheer willpower.
How close is that future? Well, forget all the race cars behind it. It’s the Chevrolet Blazer EV SS pace car that may be more indicative of the future that will soon be upon NASCAR.
The 615 hp Chevrolet Blazer EV SS paces the 2025 Daytona 500. Not only is it the first all-electric vehicle to pace the race, it’s more powerful than the restricted race cars.
“While we do not comment on future products,” concluded Thompson, “we assure you we are working on what’s next for Chevrolet in NASCAR.”
Because NASCAR always keeps racing.
John Pearley Huffman has been writing about cars since 1990 and is getting okay at it. Besides Road & Track, his work has appeared in Car and Driver, the New York Times and more than 100 automotive publications and websites. A graduate of UC Santa Barbara, he still lives near that campus with his wife and two children. He owns a pair of Toyota Tundras and two dogs. He used to have a Nova and a Camaro.
