What was once all American racing and individual and team ingenuity, became progressively totalitarian, like the GuvCo schools, and until NASCAR ultimately demanded absolute uniformity and conformity.
Didn't IROC teach them anything? Apparently not.
While its driver safety is remarkable, the Car Of Tomorrow was a ratings disaster that stayed way too long.
NASCAR(?) or some PTB actually had to be talked into letting the manufacturers have some brand identity beyond different stickers on the same body. That wing? Really??
Whatever made stock car racing fun and entertaining died at the heavy, totalitarian hand of NASCAR, for all of the reasons you mentioned...and then, Dale Earnhardt died.
People I know who literally grew up at Charlotte Motor Speedway stopped watching racing, especially since Dale died. No interest whatsoever. I tell them it's gotten better...still not interested.
I followed NASCAR pretty closely for a few years, although I have to admit I didn’t pay real close attention to it until after the CART/IRL split (for most of the ‘80s and ‘90s I was a pretty big fan of CART). But then they decided to introduce the Chase, the “lucky dog” rule, the green-white-checkered rule...
I liked NASCAR a lot better when it was a racing series. Between all the silliness in NASCAR and the ongoing drama between CART/ChampCar and IRL, in the last ten years I’ve become a big fan of sports car racing. And I still follow F1 as much as I can given that it switched to ANOTHER cable channel that isn’t part of the package I subscribe to.
It’s become a rich man’s sport.
I am old, but I remember when people showed up in a Stock Car carried on a trailer behind his family car and qualified.
Today its a special car built for racing Tractor trailers filled with parts and mechanics, big teams own all of them and a man cannot get into the game without being a quadruple millionaire.