The Car of Tomorrow | Shift with Richard Petty

The car of tomorrow. A departure from anything they had done before. As time progresses, you have to move forward. Every two or three years they have a different kind of change, different rule. They tried to make a big leap. The only thing is the car of tomorrow, all the cars look the same. This was their first step in saying, okay, we've got to make our cars a little bit better and make the show a little bit better. Make the cars all equal as much as we can. Up until that time, one year Fords would be better aerodynamically. Next year, CrossFit would be better. Next year, Chevrolet might be better. There was a lot of cars running up and down the road with little wings on the back of them. So they said, okay, we've got to look more like what the general public looks like, what they see every day. So that was one of the reasons for the wing. Plus, they'd done a bunch of wind tunnel tests with the thing. They'd done some safety features in the car at that time, spreading the roll bars out and the suspension, how the car was built, all that was basically the same thing. They kept modifying where you could get bigger and better equipment or bigger and better spindles and rear ends or engines or whatever it was. When you built a car, you just built it a little bit different. You build it to the next spec. Collectively, every driver complains about the car. Over a period of time, I think everybody got pretty disgusted with the way it was working and so they finally went away from that. Had you ever lived through a time where everybody complained about the same thing? Yeah, yes. Okay. Everybody always complained. He's got more horsepower than I have. He's got a better aero package. The car's better than ours. We need more spoiler and this goes back to the mid-60s. It's never been settled.