I remember as a young teenager when Buddy Baker broke the 200mph barrier in a Dodge Daytona at Talladega. My brother went out and bought the next issue of Stock Car Racing and we read about it weeks after the fact. I even remember in the earlier '60s before the factory aero-car wars when the teams ran regular hardtops and two-door sedans, with engines and transmissions we all recognized from performance cars and their powertrains on the street, with additional sheet metal mods and rollbars and cages and frame gussets and so-forth welded in to help hold them together at 170mph.
That all started to change in '72 when NASCAR dropped their mandate that the teams use factory built cars - stock cars - and switched to allowing the racing teams to build their cars from the ground up. Then began the slow downward slide of true NASCAR racing. Now, it's a disaster. NASCAR is completely gone. It's as phony as a three-dollar bill; it's the show, as Richard Petty has described it as being.
It seems the executives get their focus groups from people who've never torqued a cylinder head down. The drivers all have to look like clean-cut country singers. The idiotic "Chase" is aimed at those with no bonding with "STOCK" CARS, and no attention-span - but who have a craving for pop-culture nonsense. Save the playoffs for the NFL, NHL, and NBA. It doesn't belong in racing.