For a sport born on the clay bullrings of the Carolinas, NASCAR has gradually spit-shined its way into the high-tech age of today.

The face of the sport, the look and feel of the sport, and how we watch the sport has drastically changed through the years and will continue to do so as new technologies emerge.

Gone are the days of the backyard-mechanic mentality and some fear one day that the grit and guts of the man behind the wheel will take a back seat to highly-trained, sophisticated engineers, specialist and templates.

Maintaining the human element of the sport all the while progressing in a tech-based society is a fine line and difficult to do at times, said John Dodson, who has worked on both sides of the fence. Dodson was as a car builder for Rusty Wallace in the late 1980s and now is a representative at NASCAR's Technical Institute in Charlotte.

"When I came through the sport, you were called a mechanic and you could do just every job in the shop, now everyone is specialized and they are called technicians," Dodson said. "And just about every job now in NASCAR requires training; you can't just join a team right out of high school, like I did. It's not the old dirty car of the past. Sponsors want squeaky clean."

Dodson and others fear some innovations and rules -- namely with the Car of Tomorrow -- will hamper creativity within the sport.

"We are slowly loosing our hands -on approach, our creativity boundaries are being limited and without parameters you learn and get better," Dodson added.

At one point, Cup Series director John Darby was quoted as saying, "We don't want NASCAR to turn into more of a video game than a sport." ... A year later, it was a video game simulator that Denny Hamlin said helped him sweep Pocono in 2006.

Dodson realizes it's a "lead, follow or get out of the way" frame of mind when talking technology, and the sport has seen a laundry list of improvements through the years.

The latest and greatest, or the most costly and controversial, advancement is the COT.

Andrew Giangola, a spokesman for NASCAR business communications, said the new chassis is one way of maintaining NASCAR nostalgia and human element.

"While the 'Car of Tomorrow' name evokes the future, the car is in a sense a throw back," Giangola said. "In being less aero dependent, the Car of Tomorrow is ironically more like yesterday, in putting the racing back in the driver's hands.

"But to get there, this five-year project drew on cutting-edge technology in both safety and car design, and helps increase the kind of bunched-up racing fans love."

Number crunching

And to better understand the bunches, NASCAR's timing and scoring and charting data has particularly come a long way from the days where lap times were tracked by a hand-held stopwatch and scratched on a piece of paper.

In May 1993, NASCAR made a leap forward when it integrated electronic scoring.

Prior to electronic scoring, margins of victory were scored in laps, car lengths or feet, said Mike Forde, manager of statistics for NASCAR. Now the standard is measured in fractions of a second. (Continued)