North American Touring Car Championship Was Peak Glory for the Maligned Dodge Stratus
The Dodge Stratus was the car to beat in NATCC, a strange racing series that only lasted for two seasons before its demise.
Throughout the long and illustrious history of motorsports, we’ve seen a handful of strange bedfellows – or rather, cars that weren’t really designed to go racing doing precisely that. In NASCAR, for example, teams have used some rather mundane mainstream sedans as the basis for stock car racers, vehicles that precisely no one is modifying in the real world to extract extra performance from. Then there’s the Dodge Stratus, a now-largely-forgotten mid-size sedan that was actually a pretty massive critical success when it debuted back in 1995, but eventually fell out of favor before production ended in early 2006. However, the Dodge Stratus also enjoyed tremendous success in the North American Touring Car Championship (NATCC), as The Autopian recently reflected on.
The NATCC – created as a support series for CART – was a touring car series that blessed North America with some very interesting racing action for a mere two years – 1996 and 1997 – and was the brainchild of IndyCar team owner Gerald Forsythe. It featured some familiar names – such as Randy Pobst and David Donohue – each of whom took home one a driver championship during those two years, hopping behind the wheel of “exciting” machines like the Honda Accord, Ford Mondeo, Pontiac Sunfire, and of course, the Dodge Stratus.
Thing is, this wasn’t exactly a totally level playing field, as there were but two vehicles that dominated NATCC competition during its short lifespan – the Honda Accord – specifically, the one run by the PacWest Racing team – and the Dodge Stratus factory team, which was operated by TC Kline Racing.
However, as one might imagine, there were a few problems with NATCC that helped accelerate its failure. While the racing action was actually solid, as we can see in some of these throwback videos, and it attracted its fair share of fans along the way, officials had trouble getting teams to sign up.
David Donohue, 1997 North American Touring Car Championship, 2.0 Dodge Stratus/PacWest Racing. Overall winner. pic.twitter.com/Rtjb8mn6am
— Rainer Nyberg (@RainerNyberg1) February 13, 2021
They also had issues trying to get NASCAR-crazed fans to tune in and watch these low-power sedans battle for position, which meant that it ultimately died an unceremonial death in 1998. But for two shining seasons, the Dodge Stratus was the car to beat in this somewhat bizarre and certainly obscure racing series.
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