NR03 : Short Track Saturday! Fulton Speedway 358 Modifieds

New series. Personal NR03 retrospective below. (as I've been asked before about NR03, but it's not really fresh enough to do a dedicated video of it)

Nascar Racing 2003 season. A pretty dang effective use of $30 ten years ago, I'd say. Yes, I've had it since release and yes, I still have it. It's both funny and sad to go back and play NR03 again. I know a lot of oval guys still hold it up high, and I know very well how good it truly is, mods or not....

But I honestly forgot how good it was. Usually when you fire up an old title you play for 5 minutes, go "holy crap, this looks like crap and drives like ice" (precisely what I said after retrying PTC mod for F1C a month ago), NR03 though... it's shockingly good even though I know how good it was in it's heyday.

The AI is still amazing and makes anything ISI or SMS or whoever it is this week's offerings look like they were coded by a 7 year old.

The tracks are actually accurate - heck, Simbin of today can't even get tracks near to the same accuracy despite increased PC performance.

Pitcrews on pitroad. That isn't a prerendered scene. Looking at you, GTR2.

Mods. Tons of mods. Cup. Grand National. Trucks. Modern at the time Trans-Am. I even remember a Ferrari 330 in there at one point. Then don't forget the Redline GTP and Tornado Alley OWR mod that brought the house down. Literally, as FIRST / iRacing to be busted out the lawyers.

Track modding as well - officially supported you could say thanks to Sandbox. An actual tool to enable and facilitate track creation, who would have thought!

It's sort of sad to see how NR03 was basically "killed" due to iRacing (and legally so, as painful as it is) cutting down on the community, yet to see how far it has come DESPITE modding being severely hampered shows just how truly special this sim was, and still is.

Papyrus for life.