Stock cars and Nascar

A ‘stock car’, in the original sense of the term, is an automobile that has not been modified from its original factory configuration. Later the term ‘stock car’ came to mean any production-based automobile used in racing. This term is used to differentiate such a car from a ‘race car’: a special, custom-built car designed only for racing purposes. Nascar, founded in 1948, is US motor sport’s pre-eminent stock car racing organization.

Nascar’s requirement demanded that vehicles to be raced must be available to the general public and sold through dealerships in specific minimum numbers. For 1970, Nascar raised the production requirement from 500 examples to one for every two manufacturer’s dealers in the US. In the case of Plymouth, that meant having to build 1920 Superbirds. Due to increasing emissions regulations, combined with insurance hikes for highperformance cars and Nascar’s effective ban on the aero cars, 1970 was its only production year.

In the 1920s and ’30s, Daytona Beach became known as the place to set world-land-speed records.

The Daytona 500 is a 500-mile-long (805km) Nascar Cup Series motor race held annually at Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida. The inaugural Daytona 500 was held in 1959, coinciding with the opening of the speedway. Daytona International Speedway is 2.5 miles (4km) long and a 500-mile race requires 200 laps to complete.