SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - NASCAR Racing 2003 Season: Still Going Strong in 2004

Despite Papyrus moving out of the NASCAR simulation business, we can still have our own “2004 Season” thanks to the efforts of the dedicated mod community that supports this fantastic simulation. There are literally dozens of sites devoted to expanding on and improving this fantastic simulation, which if we’re all lucky will keep it alive and fresh as long as GPL has. Indeed Papyrus included a hidden gem in their code, a separate SCCA Trans Am physics model which will allow mod teams to develop virtually new racing simulations based on this great software code. However, for this article I am going to stick to NASCAR’s Nextel Cup series and how we can create our own “2004 Season” with just a few trips around the Internet. During the off-season I searched the web for quality car skins depicting the upcoming 2004 season cars. There are quite a few out there, but I think I found some of the best at Racin’World.net, where talented artist Shawn Purdy has been hard at work creating new cup.car files for the 2004 season. Note that on occasion, Racin’World.net is unavailable. When the site is down, you will get a blank white screen at the address. Not to worry, the site is normally down from time to time as Shawn makes updates and/or revisions. Simply check back again later on and you’ll find the site up and running.

Click on the thumbnails above to see Shawn Purdy's beautiful work full screen.

Shawn’s work, aided by some of his friends, is truly awe-inspiring. If you do a quick search of the Internet for "NR 2003 Cars" you’ll find dozens of sites offering a wide variety of cars with real, fictional, historical and 2004 paint schemes. But I think Shawn Purdy’s creations are something special. While there are many sites offering cup.car files for download, not all 3rd party cars are created equal. Some are in the original low-res (512x512) format, others are high resolution (1024x1024) but with compressed graphics that reduce their clarity in deference to better frame rates. But with most hard-core simulation fans “driving” fairly high-end systems (especially if you “fly” LOMAC or IL-2FB), having to make compromises to efficient rendering isn’t really an issue with NR 2003. So Shawn provides his car files in a completely uncompressed, hi-resolution 1024x1024 format. Unzipped, his cars weigh in at sizes as large as 4MB — substantially larger than most compressed hi-res cars at roughly 1MB). But the graphics quality is worth the extra size. On my Dell 8300 3.0GHz / Radeon 9800 machine, Shawn’s cars look spectacular and I still get frame rates in the 40-70 range with every graphics option enabled. Once you’ve driven against uncompressed high-res cars in a race it’s hard to go back to the stock lo-res cars that ship with the game — or against anyone else’s 3rd party cars for that matter. These new 2004 cars breathe a whole new look into this great simulation. If you’re the type that likes to “shop around” for your 3rd party downloads, another great source of well-illustrated 2004 cars can be found at On The Edge Racing (OTE). When you go there, just click on the “Nextel Cup” logo near the top of the page and check out their “real schemes” section which has a mix of 2003 and 2004 files to choose from. Of particular note are the 2004 cup.car files created by “VeNoM” which are large format, hi-res and very nicely rendered. If you need less demanding, lower-res car files in order to run NR 2003 on your system, check out Extreme-Dynamics 2004 cars download page. Low-res cars are typically less than 500 kb in size. Besides getting the latest 2004 paint jobs for your next race, a great side benefit associated with these 3rd party downloads is the ability to add teams to the roster that did not ship with the game.

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