I understand that nascar had a behind the scenes part in the Gold Crown project, but it had USAC's name all over it. nascar didn't really have a need for this series, but USAC did. So the fact that nascar pulled their support should not have resulted in pulling the plug.

I don't remember the amounts given for the Gold Crown car, but my memory is thinking something like $80K w/o engine. Whatever the cost was, I am pretty sure it was too high in a couple of ways. One, it cost a lot more than the regular SC car so that would limit the number of people that might have otherwise be interested. The other was that when you really look at that car, it's not really that much different than a regular SC car construction wise. It's basically a sprint/midget/SC car chassis with some extra bodywork. So other than the "road racer's bias" how do you justify the substantial additional cost?

Consider the Riley DP cars. They are tube framed cars with normally aspirated pushrod V8s putting out around 500hp and they sell for half a million give or take a bit. So in Riley's mind, an $80K roller is probably bargain basement stuff. But if you compare it to a regular SC car, then that's pretty expensive bodywork.

Does anyone know if the Gold Crown car (the first version) is legal to run against this latest version? There could be a lot of reasons that it would not be, but to me they look almost identical, so why not? They got around 12 or so of the first versions on the track and if there are 23 sold versions of the new one, that's 35 cars, enough for a race. What would it cost to provide some bodywork to the current SC cars to make them legal and competitive with those cars?

There seems to be some thinking that both the original version of the Gold Crown car and the latest versions are some sort of break through in design because of the involvement of Riley and Ashmore, but I don't see any cutting edge stuff that would justify the expense. Does anyone? It's a tube frame car without any significant carbon fiber.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to come up with something that is relatively affordable.