An Elder Millennial’s Oral History of EA Sports-Era NASCAR Games, Part 1
This is an adaptation of a lengthy Twitter thread I did on the matter over the course of approximately two and a half weeks. It has been edited for clarity and to correct factual errors in some parts. Meta-commentary will be preceded by the tag “META:” and in italics.
If you like sports and competition but you’ve kind of been disillusioned with NASCAR for a while now, possibly related to the perception that the series is now endless repetitions of the same 1.5 mile oval, 2021 could be the year you get some interest back in the old hobby. Far from the dark ages of the turn of last decade, the 2021 NASCAR schedule features 6 road courses. In addition to the ancient standbys of Sonoma Raceway and Watkins Glen, the 2021 schedule also includes the Daytona Roval (more commonly recognized as the venue of the 24 Hours of Daytona), Indianapolis Speedway Road Course, Circuit of the Americas, Road America, and the track that made NASCAR realize that people actually would tune in to see their land barges turn right, the Roval at Charlotte Motor Speedway. They’re also hosting a DIRT!! race at Bristol Speedway, less than two weeks from the publication of this post, the first dirt race in the top flight of the NASCAR series in the lifetimes of most the people who will read this post. You may have already missed the Daytona Roval race but there’s still plenty of time to get on your horse and start tuning in now.
Buoyed by this renewed interest, I picked up NASCAR Heat 5 and did some racing when a rush of memories struck me like a thunderbolt of the last time I was really into NASCAR, the era of Electronic Art’s NASCAR Thunder games. One of the ways EA injected some fun into the Thunders in the middle part of the aughts was to throw in a slew of more than a dozen fantasy road courses to keep you turning right, including a vast assortment of tracks that purported to be infield road courses situated at real life NASCAR venues. We now live in an age where I don’t need to dig the PS2 out of mothballs anymore, I simply fired up PCSX2 and dumped my NASCAR Thunder 2k4 disc and started going to town. From there, it further occurred to me then that this is a fairly unknown thing outside of a very specific niche, of people who were A) around for this era of NASCAR games, B) intensely interested in the fantasy courses, C) still around to blab about NASCAR, and D) motivated enough to sit up and write an essay like this. I love infodumping, you probably love learning weird things, let’s do this thing!
Our tour will span 3 games, NASCAR Heat 5, NASCAR Thunder 2004, and NASCAR 07. Your tour guide for the NASCAR Heat 5 part of the proceedings will be yours truly in my own custom 00 car in 3 different flavors:
And your tour guide for the PS2 games will be none other than the late, great, Dale Earnhardt Sr.
RAISE HELL, PRAISE DALE.
When God began to create heaven and earth, the earth being unformed and void, with darkness of the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water, God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.
Three seconds later, Dale Earnhardt burst onto the scene and busted precisely three sweet cosmic donuts on creation and thus was born Racing.
RAISE HELL, PRAISE D-ok maybe that bit’s already played out
You may already be familiar with the foundations of NASCAR, but in case you aren’t, I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version: The beach at Daytona Beach, Florida had gained a reputation in the first half of the 20th century as an extremely wide open, hardpacked area for top speed runs in cars, basically the same conceit as the Bonneville Salt Flats in the modern day. Concurrently, many bootleggers in the South during Prohibition had tuned up cars with which to outrun the cops and eventually took to arguing and betting among themselves as to whose cars were best. Daytona Beach officials aimed to capitalize on the popularity of the beach as a spot for world land speed record attempts and asked racer Sig Haugdahl to design a race track incorporating it, and then sanctioned it with a ruleset and the blessing of Johnny Law for an official event of racing at Daytona Beach. The first running of the track was a disaster, being called after 75 of 78 laps because the banking started falling apart, but Bill France Sr. assumed responsibility for promoting races at the location until organizing national race promoters into NASCAR in 1948. NASCAR Thunder 2004 recreates that course.
META: The reason you may notice that some of this gameplay is herky-jerky is two-fold. First, I had not played this game seriously since I was in high school. Secondly, I believe the PCSX2 emulator is registering my Xbox One controller joystick as an all-or-nothing proposition, with either 100% steering or 0%. The problem persists into racing games that are not Thunder 2004 or NASCAR 07. As of the writing of this article I have not managed to figure it out.
The course as seen in Thunder 2004 is, more or less, the actual Daytona Beach course that NASCAR was born on. The course started on State Road A1A and traveled south 2 miles before turning via a banked turn comprised of sand dredged from Lake Lloyd and returning 2 miles north on the Daytona Beach surface, turning back onto A1A and heading back north. The Thunder 2004 version of the course is shortened by about half because two mile long straightaways is not exactly a scintillating gameplay experience but otherwise is a fairly faithful recreation. This track was a major selling point for Thunder starting in 2003, factoring prominently in advertising for the game and is what induced a wee babby Brian to purchase Thunder 2003 in 2002.
But this isn’t the last you’ll see of Daytona in this fantasy alternate universe! In fact, Thunder also included a fantasy track located within Daytona International Speedway itself, a race dubbed the Florida 500k, as I assume the race length for these particular events was counted in kilometers. But, interestingly, even though Daytona has an actual road course, the developers of the game very pointedly did not use it.
This version of the course dives off the Daytona trioval at roughly the same point the real-life Road Course does, but instead of doing a squiggly clockwise loop before rejoining the track only a couple hundred feet off where it initially drove off, this course goes off to meander through a palm tree forest in the infield for a considerable time before hopping over Lake Lloyd on a bridge, kissing the backstretch, then coming back to the main Daytona track shortly after Turn 4.
For comparison, we fire up Forza Motorsport 7 and take a NASCAR stocker on the actual Daytona Road Course. Spoiler alert: There actually isn’t a plethora of palm trees in the Daytona infield.
This is not entirely what the NASCAR field faced for the 2021 “O’Reilly Auto Parts 253,” as NASCAR added a bus stop chicane between Turn 4 and the start-finish line on the tri-oval to check speeds going into the first turn diving into the infield. Nobody needs a good ol’ boy getting too enthusiastic and trying to take that hard left at 150 mph. There’s also a Short variant of the track, which instead of completing the loop and rejoining the course where the Road Course does, instead cuts back left and drives through some gates to come out onto the backstretch roughly a third of the way down from the tri-oval’s Turn 2. This is primarily used by motorcycle events to cut down on ultra-high speed periods.
META: Yes, sorry, I switched to using Can-Am class cars when recording this particular lap because it actually came much later in the Twitter thread than me introducing it here and I was getting kind of tired of NASCAR stockers.
Our last stop on the Daytona portion of the tour is a bit of an odd duck. By NASCAR 07, EA Sports had chucked the Daytona Beach course out on its ass but apparently still thought it needed something street-y and Daytona-y. Enter Speedway Boulevard.
You may have gathered, it is literally a lap around Daytona Speedway. It starts just outside the large hotel you may notice outside of Daytona’s Turn 3 when racing on the regular track, swoops around to drive under Daytona’s main grandstand, and then in the weirdest bit of inspired thinking you’d ever expect from a studio like EA Sports, has a brief foray onto dirt to cut back onto Daytona Beach roads before swinging around to the runways of Daytona Beach International Airport, famous for the 1984 late entrance of noted proprietor of gender-neutral bathrooms Ronald Reagan, arriving on Air Force One in the middle of the race just behind the tri-oval’s backstretch.
META: Shortly after publishing this article, I decided to get NASCAR 2005: Chase for the Cup on a lark and discovered that not only is that game when they introduced Speedway Boulevard, but they actually included a super handy track map contextualizing its relationship to Daytona Speedway!
While we have much more material to get to with the tracks, as you can see we already have a substantial lecture just as it pertains to the area of Daytona, which makes sense as it is, aside from possibly Charlotte, the most important area to the entirety of NASCAR. We’ll continue with visits to more infield tracks in the next installment, but first! A brief Racing 101 with your buddy Brian.
You may have already seen me use the term “tri-oval” earlier in the article, and if you’re a big racing fan you likely already know what a tri-oval is, but I’m nothing if not thorough so if you have any amount of confusion I’m here to help you. Many, in fact most, of NASCAR’s left-turn-only tracks are not straight-up ovals. Bill France, when designing Daytona, deduced a clever way of improving spectator sightlines along the track and devised the shape known today as the tri-oval.
The tri-oval is, as you can see, bent out significantly on one-side to create a closed-in stadium effect on the frontstretch of the oval. This significantly reduces strain on the spectators as most of them are now angled toward 3/4 of the track, only having to crane to see the turn nearest them, as opposed to having to look back and forth as if they were watching a tennis match. Most of the time the start-finish line for these tracks is located squarely in the kink of the tri-oval. I say most of the time because Talledega Superspeedway locates its start-finish line between the end of the tri-oval and Turn 1, as you can see here.
There is a variant of the tri-oval called the quad-oval, which shares much of the same design principles as the tri-oval except it features two quick snappy dogleg turns to create what is in effect three separate mini front straightaways. Charlotte, Atlanta, and Texas are tracks of this type.
There is one final variant called a D-oval, which doesn’t have a front-stretch at all and instead features just one big sweeping turn all the way from the end of Turn 4 to the beginning of Turn 1. Michigan Auto Club Speedway and Auto Club Speedway in California are the archetypes of this genre of oval.
Although in the case of Auto Club, not for long, as track owners are planning to completely reconfigure the speedway as a high-banked half mile short track in the vein of pre-renovation Bristol in time for the 2023 season.
Hopefully you found this interesting enough to yell at me if I take a long time to upload a second part to this series!
