I have made some recent discoveries along with another user, which I think should be either added to the rulebook as rules or made into a separate category.

-Career mode: In career mode, you are able to make your car 100 rated, which takes about 5-7 seasons to reach depending on what sponsors you get, the race lengths, AI difficulty, and many other factors. There is a lot of tedious effort you have to put in to get a competitive laptime actively discourages runs.

-Race times: The timer during the race breaks/glitches. Here is a quick summary from a youtube comment on my channel: "I drove a 41.3 which was literally impossible based on the top speed I achieved during the race (it was something like 261+ average mph while the fastest speed I reached in the race was around 258.) It wasn't a random fluke either, I did many laps in a row well into the mid 41 range." I have also had experience with this glitch as well, so it is of my opinion that runs should only be done in practice or qualifying of quick race mode. I also think that if people still want to do career mode runs, they should be able to in a separate category.

Hi, I'm the user in question and agree with everything AmkSKI has said. The 41.3 is referencing Tiburon if the context isn't clear, and I used the exact same setup that mrsmashboy made in a YT video (definitely an impossible lap with his setup.)

The timer glitch happened when I was playing a 100% race and I was fooling around wrecking all of the cars trying to get Shawna Robinson a 2nd place finish, lol. I sometimes do random stuff like this and pick a random backmarker to do well. It was towards the end of the race, I didn't bother recording a video of one of those laps because I didn't want it to count, but I did take a really horrible quality cellphone photo on the race stats screen. You will note that my top speed reached in the race (which was accurate) is not conducive to the lap time. I could have driven at the top speed for the entire lap and it still would have fallen short of my best lap, so the only explanation I have is that the timer was slower than normal:

https://imgur.com/kgmBgpw

It's a 3 mile track, so for me to do a lap that fast I would have needed to average more than 261 mph for the entire lap.

For Daytona/Talladega, do draft laps in-race count as opposed to single-car time trials? In single race mode for example, at Daytona, the fastest you can run in a single car time trial is roughly a 46.7 on a good day with the Preset 6/7 cheat allowing you more revs. During the race, all goes well and a draft is present, a 46 second lap is possible, or even faster.

Additionally, I also support a separation between Career/Single laps. The sheer amount of grinding necessary to get a perfect 100 car in Career is mind-boggling, even if the races are at 5 percent with caution flags. The single race cars are roughly a 75-ish equivalent in Career, and are easily 4-7 percent slower on all race tracks. This is not to dismiss TheBluestEye and his accomplishments, I love watching those runs on YouTube. However, for the common player who may have jumped into Thunder 2003 for the first time as either a casual stander-by or intrigued by the Thunder 2000 mod, there should be clear expectations that while these fast laps aren't "cheats", you must work A LOT to get there.

Guys let's be smart about this.

A set of rules that make it more akin to a realistic racing game's time trial mode is probably the way forward.

None of the EA NASCAR games have a time trial mode where you're the only car on the track. The closest equivalent is Qualifying, where it's two laps by yourself.

For all of the NASCAR games by EA (Thunder 2002, Thunder 2003, Thunder 2004, Chase 2005, 06 TTC, & 07), this would be a reasonable set of rules:

• Quick Race ONLY
• Qualifying Mode ONLY
• Damage set to ON in options.
• NO driving assists.
• Manual Transmission.
• Any camera view
• Any type of controller.
• User must record the entire qualifying session, from pressing the "Qualify" button, to the post-run screen where it displays your time (the camera pans around the car)
• Laps where you bounce off the wall, or wall-ride entirely, should not count. This is now a rule in real NASCAR as of October 2022.

Hi everyone,

Apologies for the delay in addressing this, I have been swamped with my education and have not had the chance to look at the site. After careful consideration from what others have said in this post, as well as how I and others moderate the other NASCAR titles, specifically the EA NASCAR games, I am going to make a separate leaderboard for Career Mode and Custom Paint Schemes. Going forward, the new leaderboard will house times that are only submitted via qualifying or practice using a paint scheme from the game (either default or Thunder Plate unlocks will be allowed). This will keep the rules more in line with what other NASCAR games on the site currently use, since I have previously tried to change the rules for the games I have moderator control over.

Having Career Mode times on the default leaderboard creates a barrier to entry for new speedrunners, as to even come remotely close to the times set by others, they will have to grind multiple seasons of Career Mode to have the necessary equipment. While this will still be allowed and encouraged, I agree that it should not be the default way to play for everyone. Additionally, keeping the requirements simple to just practice or qualifying allows runners to choose their preference, as the AI cars in practice can be helpful for drafting purposes but also can be literal roadblocks for faster setups. Over the course of the near future, I will establish the new boards and transfer times over. Thank you all for discussing this, if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out to me!

Hello Tristin,

It is possible through sponsorship incentives to drive an in-game paint scheme in career mode, so I don't think that's an effective way to rule it out. Sometimes whether or not a time was driven in career mode can still be obvious like at Daytona/Talladega, where a career mode car can't sustain 10k RPM without blowing up, but on short tracks there's really not a good way to tell. I will admit I don't have a good solution for this off the top of my head, but it is something to note. One more thing to note is that AI cars don't exist in either practice or qualifying, only in the race itself (and the amount of time you can gain by timing a lap to get drafts off another car is trivial compared to the time saved from the timer slowdown glitch.)

I'm also not sure separate charts are necessary for ALL tracks, just the ones that are possible to play in career mode. I only have one submitted lap time and it did use a custom paint scheme, but it was also for the Talladega infield course which is a track that is impossible to play on career mode. It just feels a little odd to have a separate chart for something like that where neither side has any differences.

With that said I 100% agree with the rest of the rule changes and think it's a great way to ensure fairness while at the same time not having an unrealistically high barrier for entry for such a niche game. Well done regarding that!

Hi Brett,

Thanks for the feedback, I have since made some changes to the rules and how the runs are sorted behind the scenes. I am still new to moderating, especially when it comes to adding variables and such to change how runs are sorted or displayed. As of now, all Default times will consist of paint schemes and Thunder Plates of active and real drivers only. Fantasy Drivers and custom paint schemes are assumed to be in Career Mode now to avoid any confusion and help with sorting the runs. This is, in my opinion, the only foolproof solution to preventing any overlap with runs that could be in Career Mode but are allowed due to appearing as a Fantasy Driver paint scheme. The only exceptions to this are 3% Race Lengths submissions, since Career Mode doesn’t have 3%, and all times on Fantasy Tracks since they aren’t in Career Mode.

I have also changed the rules to allow Quick Race submissions in addition to Practice and Qualifying for Best Lap times, since allowing Practice for drafting purposes and not allowing Quick Race didn’t make sense to me when I went back and looked at it. In addition, I have also created dropdown categories for Race Lengths to better differentiate the two categories of times. The only downside is I don’t know of a way to update the leaderboard for Race Lengths to not display the top 3 times across all lengths, but the times are correctly sorted within each track when you click on them. Hopefully this helps to clear up any confusion and further sort the leaderboards more properly!

Hello Tristin,

I 100% agree with your first paragraph, to the best of my knowledge the regular drivers (excluding the Busch Series) and legends (Yarborough, Langley, Lund, etc.) are the only cars that can't be driven in career mode, and the fantasy road course tracks along with Daytona Beach and Tiburon, so I think you covered all the bases there. I do want to clarify something on the second paragraph though:

I have also changed the rules to allow Quick Race submissions in addition to Practice and Qualifying for Best Lap times, since allowing Practice for drafting purposes and not allowing Quick Race didn’t make sense to me when I went back and looked at it.

This is where I think you went in the wrong direction I'm afraid. You can't draft in practice, there's no AI cars during practice nor qualifying so you cannot draft in either, only the quick race. The bigger problem I have with quick race is that the timer can slow down which would allow for impossibly fast lap times which I've already shown a photo of in my first post of the topic. That's a much bigger concern than trying to painstakingly time a lap so that you can catch the AI cars in the right spot while simultaneously not being held up by them. For this reason I think allowing practice and qualifying times only for best lap is the way to go, since neither of them benefit from drafting nor the timer slowdown glitch (as far as I know anyway, I don't really know what causes it, just that it happened to me during a 100% quick race and I'm not the only person it's happened to.)

I hope I'm not coming across as rude btw, I can be a bit blunt but I don't really mean to be a jerk. I know how hard moderating can be and I appreciate what you've done so far.

Hello Brett,

On the topic of Quick Races, that is what I meant the change to be yesterday, I have made it correctly now to limit Best Lap runs to just Practice and Qualifying. I got the change wrong in my last post since I was roughly 3 hours into editing everything before writing the rules/post and got the change backwards in the rules due to being too tired. Should be fixed now!