Released on February 13th, 2003, NASCAR Racing 2003 Season was the final title developed by sim racing pioneers Papyrus Design Group after fifteen exciting years spent revolutionizing the genre.
While the company re-established itself under a new moniker in the late 2000’s, eventually finding commercial success with their massively multiplayer online racing simulator known as iRacing, NR2003 in the meantime became an instant hit with auto racing fans thanks to first-class artificial intelligence, tire behavior modeled with the help of none other than Goodyear Inc., and expansive third party modification support.
As both EA Sports and Eutechnyx fumbled the official NASCAR license, releasing game after game which the community deemed to be unsatisfactory at best, countless hardcore stock car racing enthusiasts went into overdrive, investing heavy hours into keeping NR2003 as relevant as possible. The result was a third-party mod scene which seemingly took on a life of it’s own, and at it’s peak matched the content creation frenzy surrounding other PC gaming giants such as DOOM, Half-Life 2, Counter Strike, Quake, Madden 08, or NHL 2004.
The NR2003Encyclopedia is my personal collection of cars I’ve amassed for the game since it’s launch some fifteen years ago. While I haven’t gone out and tracked down every last publicly available car file – as that would be insanity and mostly pointless – the encyclopedia is instead a collection of complete stock car racing seasons spanning numerous decades and sanctioning bodies, plus some cool surprises that the average NASCAR fan would appreciate as an added bonus. Obtaining a lot of the seasons were as easy as clicking download link and extracting the RAR file into some sort of organized folder, others were snatched prior to sites going offline permanently, and there were a handful that were manually assembled, one by one, that would have otherwise been lost among 2,000 pages of loose car files.
Think of it as your uncle’s diecast collection on steroids.
The reason for doing this is simple: NR2003 is now almost fifteen years old, and it’s still the best stock car game. Period.
Back during the height of its’ popularity, part of the fun was discovering new add-on sites and checking every few days to see what the community could come up with next. With so many of these sites either slowing down or disappearing completely off the internet, sending newcomers or old-time vets on that same scavenger hunt for add-on content, when they’re really just looking to spend an afternoon or an evening turning laps, is absolutely fucking pointless. Let’s just package everything up in a few giant bundles so you can get to the fun part.
Not every folder is organized/named 100% perfectly, and not every car has been converted to the proper physics format. You will need to make use of the resources page to obtain the appropriate tools to do so. If you’re just getting into NR2003 and have no idea where to start, I do recommend visiting one of the active communities, introducing yourself, and asking for help getting started. This is a giant car file archive and isn’t really intended to be a tutorial or a message board or anything like that, though I’ve left the comments open on every section in the event there’s something you want to contribute.
Approx. 40GB of disk space is required. That’s not a typo. You have been warned.
Austin Ogonoski
“James” of PretendRaceCars.net
Driver of the #2 Slightly Mad Studios Chevrolet SS for Lengert Motorsports
2016 Edmonton International Raceway Rookie of the Year – Hornets
2017 WESCAR Late Model Tour Rookie of the Year
NR2003 Encyclopedia 