Customer Reviews

NASCAR's Wild Years: Stock Car Technology in the 1960's

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a MUST! Why? Because besides giving you TONS of GREAT COLOR & B&W shots of the rise and development of NASCAR from the end of the 1950s, to the early 1970s, with full-detail shots of motors, frames, all the "star" drivers, and legendary "tuners" over the years, along with absorbing data to read, the book also includes shots, by year, of some of the well-known Super Stock drag cars, and... good shots of just assembly line passenger cars, by year, so model builders who like to do "factory stock" replica models, will have good reference material. So much of accurate scale model building is reliant on GOOD REFERENCE books/photos, & this book should well be in any SERIOUS Vintage Nascar builder's collection. Extremely HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Well worth the money, and an absorbing read.

excellent pictures of 60's and 70's cars and engines. really brings you back to a time when cars were cars.

I was slightly disappointed by the author's coverage of one of the most interesting trends of the Sixties: 'Universal' stock cars based on specialized racing parts. The Galaxie-derived "Fairlane" stock cars were the beginning of the transition from standard frames. I wanted to read more about this (and perhaps about the generic Ford-based "GM" stock cars of the Seventies).

I severely mark down the rating of this book because of numerous factual errors in peripheral information. There are many errors in information that isn't directly related to the technical facts (for example, the introduction and early years of the Mercury Comet). The closer the material comes to the core subject, the more closely it matches what I remember from other sources. As a guess, I think that the author carefully researched the Nascar-specific technology and wrote the rest (such as industry trends) without such careful research. However, the general inaccuracies of the readily available peripheral information make it impossible to consider this book a generally reliable resource.

There's a surprising amount of information about stock drag racing cars. Not a problem, but not exactly what I expected.