Tell me if I'm way off the mark here, but Australia was homologating and building powerful v8 touring car race cars for decades?
If we can do it why can't the USA?
You guys are road racing them, not ripping around 2.5-mile and 2.66-mile ovals where they run three cars wide all day. Most of the drivers loathe running at those tracks because it is very likely that you will get caught up in a massive accident which you had absolutely no part in making. The ATCC and the V8 Supercars that followed it were, and still are, real monsters that the drivers have to really push around, and most of the best of the Group 3A and Group A era cars were no different. That's true at NASCAR road races and some ovals, but the environments are very, very different.
So perhaps that's what can happen, Chev and Ford get out of NASCAR and Caddy and Lincoln get in. IIRC there was a magazine article about the fastest GM 4 doors in 1990 when the VN Group A came out, the European was the Lotus Vauxhall Carlton but the American was a Cadillac.
The last rear-driver Cadillac big sedan of the time was the DeVille, which went to FWD in 1985. The last rear-drivers of the era from GM were the G-Bodies, the last of which rolled off the line in January 1988. The Chevrolet Caprice remained, but that thing, like the Ford Crown Victoria (which at the time was even more dated mechanically) was a two-ton plus pig with a flexible chassis riding on leaf-spring rear suspension and with sloppy recirculating call steering. Most American big cars moved directly from the chassis little changed since the 1960s to the transverse front-drivers mentioned above. Sure, you could race the Camaro or the Mustang, but those are smaller and lighter cars again, their suspension isn't a whole lot better and their chassis and bodies combined with the engines of the time would see speeds get out of control quickly, plus that also goes against the ethos of "stock car" racing as NASCAR was at the time. As much as you would probably admit that many of the cars that ran in the Group A era in Australia weren't the last word in sophistication (the Ford Sierra RS500 in particular I know could be a real handful on full boost), they have the pieces of garbage Detroit made at the time covered by a couple orders of magnitude.
Yes. It requires that they become competent enough to outfox Stanley Yates.
Considering that staff has a hard time regulating the cars they have now, forgive me for having little faith in that ability.
And it's not like you can't regulate the crap out of displacement, set rigorously enforced weight limits, and require minimum levels of safety equipment such as stabilizing aerodynamic devices.
Stabilizing aerodynamic devices were not known to any real degree until the late 1980s, and that's too late for this. Yes, you can set displacement and weight limits and safety requirements (NASCAR already has these, and to their credit their safety is usually quite good), but the fact is that if you allow manufacturers go nuts on this by the mid-1980s the speeds WILL get insanely fast, and the playing with fire on this one could very easily backfire just as it did with Group B, but the consequences of a Bobby Allison moment where the car gets into the grandstands does not bear contemplation. The simple fact that NASCAR's kind of racing can only be done with the big, heavyweight cars, and keeping those cars on production chassis requires them not going to front wheel drive. The reason they went there was the CAFE laws, assembly costs and the fact that a hamfisted driver with a front-driver can more easily deal with the consequences of a driving mistake.
Furthermore, it's not like the move by the American Automotive industry to transverse FF platforms is inevitable, or has to occur at all ITTL. Hell, even if it did occur for the majority of the vehicle range, there's still moving to pony cars and personal luxury vehicles which are gonna stay mostly FR no matter what, and can share platforms with other FR/F4 vehicles globally.
I wouldn't call that FR not matter what. The Mustang was one angry fanbase away from being replaced by the front-drive V6-powered Ford Probe, the Camaro went away for a decade, even the big Cadillacs had gone to front-wheel-drive by the early 1990s. Ford can fight back with the Crown Victoria and Lincoln derivatives of it, but that's a fat pig of a car with ancient suspension design. It doesn't have to happen, sure, but save major changes in the way American automakers operate, it's going to happen in any case, and you'll be left with unsuitable cars. There is a reason American racing in general largely left behind production car-based racing in the 1970s, and it was because they simply became total garbage that had no business being raced by that time.
You might be able to have manufacturer warfare and homologation specials continue in IMSA and Trans Am where the road racing tracks they race on have generally lower average speeds, but not NASCAR. By the 1980s, it would be a disaster waiting to happen, and it would require either NASCAR letting the manufacturers much more leeway or the manufacturers keeping V8-powered rear-drive everyday vehicles. The first idea is against the ethos of the people who run the sport, the latter would be impossible because of CAFE. My point still stands, its either put the production bodies on custom chassis (which is what they did anyways until the mid-1990s) or don't bother.
