The Secret Squirrel stuff...
Here are some of the shots we recieved from NASCAR 4. The first one concerns the title page (which strangely says NASCAR 4) ;] but not just that, as you can see, it shows an option for different series from the main menu. We're presuming that that menu will say Winston Cup (or whatever format that takes with new sponsorship), Busch Grand National, ect, with maybe some provisions to add your own racing league? Click on the pictures to enlarge...you must have Javascript enabled in your browser to open the windows. We're hoping that video archive may mean that you can export to .avi or something, but we're not going that far...we're just hoping!

The Opponent Manager (driver menu) brings up some very interesting new features as well. Cars/drivers can now be tied to teams, and you can obviously change the teams that the drivers are racing for, or add new teams yourself. We can tell you one other feature about N4 that we don't show here...Daytona DOES show up in the track menus screen...

The Graphics Option menu brings up some more new features...gone is the confusing 'draw ahead' distance numbers, and it's replaced by an easy slider bar, as well as mirror draw behind. Very nice touch, and should help out by reducing framerate hits because your mirror is trying to draw all the way back to who knows where.

Now comes some really great news...the setups menu expands to at least three menus now. The first is the main chassis menu, and there have been quite a few additions. First, the springs are now set by poundage (as in the real cars), not by percentage. There is a setting for the compression and rebound of the chassis, plus you can add spring rubbers in the springs, and set the length of the bump rubbers for the chassis. The ride height can be adjusted, as well as the track bar on the rear. There is a provision to export (as text?) as well as a spot for track and chassis notes. Quite a few additions

This menu deals with engine and drivetrain manipulation. First, you can set the different type of engines (presumably race, qualify, and test engines) and the transmission ratios can be set (same as the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th gears). The differential type can be set as well, from probably open to locked (whether the rear wheels will operate independantly or will be 'locked' together). One further adjustment is the rear end gears (diff ratio).

Last menu is the weight. Nothing new here, except all the click-arrows have been replace by slider bars around a weight distribution chart of the car. Very nice.

Now we're finally going to show you the car/track. Not much to report here, as the graphics are still in the infancy stages. However, it is interesting to note that the GPL replay menu makes it's appearance here, hinting that possibly alot of the GPL engine (or physics at least) may also be ported to NASCAR 4? We can only hope, but the initial outlook is good. We'll continue to give you information as we get ahold of it, but it looks like another very promising outing from Papyrus.