Welcome to the last edition of Aussie Stock Car News for 2024, what a big year it has been.

ASCN celebrated its ninth birthday yesterday, the time has gone by pretty quickly and we’ve seen so many changes take place over the years, when ASCN started as World of AUSCAR back in 2015, Stock Cars Australia was struggling to get a field together for rounds and now twenty vehicle fields are a possibility.

The big news of the week is that the 2025 Stock Cars Australia schedule has been released, and the action currently takes the field to Winton, Sydney Motorsport Park, One Raceway and Calder Park Raceway.

As said earlier that having a field of twenty or more vehicles is not out of the question, it just comes down to timing, availability and vehicle status.

It will be the first Stock Car related season finale at Calder Park Raceway since V8 Stock Cars ended their 2001 season at the track, their only complete season as the 2002 season collapsed after three rounds.

Calder Park in November is good for ASCN, an extra month and a bit to put away money to go and have a great time.

The festive season was largely spent giving Assetto Corsa a good run on the PC, Brodies Assetto Mods have created a usable version of the Thunderdome and Calder Park Raceway, you can actually explore all of Calder Park.

It is so good that even the Kim Jane car is in its usual position out the front, yep you can drive a little of the Calder Freeway before cruising around the Thunderdome and Calder Park Raceway and go visit the garages too.

It is around 95% accurate in terms of layout and it is truly impressive to look at and use, it took a bit of effort but managed to get the Ford up the mound to look over the track, and you can enter the Thunderdome via both tunnels if you don’t mind doing some off road driving.

Hopefully further work is done on it to take into account recent developments and allow full on races on the Thunderdome and National Circuit, the game’s cars are not 100% accustomed to oval racing.

The team at V8 Sleuth have been busy in the festive season, three AUSCAR/NASCAR related posts on their Facebook page in the last couple of days.

The videos are the Bombski wreck, the Ian Thomas and Barry Blake wreck and the Fastrack video.

Hopefully somebody in the discussion about Fastrack will mention being driven around or driving a NASTRAK Oldsmobile, a picture would be even better, one can always hope.

The #14 has a new rear window ordered which is good news, it has been great following the progress of the car, the Botheras Family Racing AUSCAR Adventure group has reached 350 members.

AUSCAR #31 posted a Christmas message on December 24, they are just one follower away from reaching 50 followers, surely, we have a reader or more here who can make it happen and/or start pushing the page towards 100 followers.

“Twelve months ago, we hadn’t even thought about buying an AUSCAR” it just shows how suddenly life can change, an opportunity you never thought would exist pops up and if everything is by the numbers, run with it and see what happens.

Today’s research efforts were focused on ‘Race Cars & Engines’ (a company not the two items) and the Slender You Oldsmobile.

It seems ‘Race Cars & Engines’ may have played a large role in Stock Car numbers in Australia, but we need to find somebody who knows who they are as every online search gives the answer as everybody’s cars and everybody’s engines, The Third Turn mentions them in the sponsors category of the #31 Oldsmobile of Johnny Rutherford and another car has them along with ‘Car #19’ which likely means their 19th car.

We may have found somebody from Bob Clark Motorsports who can answer if the team had pink paint in the interior of the cars, this could solve the riddle of the #3 Lumina (former NASTRAK Oldsmobile), but long time Australian NASCAR team members do look closely at the above photo, somebody must recognise that shade of pink from somewhere.

There’s a few little bits and pieces to do before the year is out, got some ideas to try out and see if they are suitable for launch at the end of the year and continue to read and look at photos in the hope of finding the NASTRAK Oldsmobile that we’re looking for.

See you next week.