Did you ever stop and consider that perhaps with the tightness of the rules, the old car just was NOT FIXABLE? Sometimes the engineers get it right, sometimes they get it wrong, and when it comes to bodies, sometimes they are at the mercy of what the design department gives them to work with. So Toyota got it right. Well congratulations to them, give them a gold star. The Chevy, for whatever reason is NOT right, and the choice was to either let them try to fix it, or just tell Chevy and their teams they have to just waste their time and money for a year. If the shoe was on the other foot, the story would be EXACTLY the same. NASCAR wants all three of the manufacturers to succeed, and they NEED them to succeed, so as much as you may want to deny it, NASCAR would make similar moves if it was Toyota in the ditch. In years past, NASCAR would have just let Chevy make some spoiler or air dam or body height changes to cure an inequality, but the only remedy they give the teams now is to submit a whole new body. I've been on every side of this argument. As a Chevy guy, I was pissed as can be back in the early 90's when NASCAR approved what became known as the Yates cylinder head so the Fords could keep up. At the time, cylinder heads had to totally mimic the production counterpart in basic design. The Yates head threw that out the window, and within a year, it was the Chevy's that couldn't keep up, which led to them having to come up with a whole new non-stock based design themselves, which was the first step in allowing engines that bear no resemblance to production engines. In the mid 90's the noncompetitive Pontiacs were given a new nose that bore no resemblance to a factory car to keep them in the game. When Ford quit producing the Thunderbird, NASCAR for the first time in their history allowed a four door model, the Taurus. When Dodge wanted to join the party, they were allowed to create an engine out of thin air, just as Toyota was allowed to several years later.
