This is what I grew up on in the late 90s, and what I was hoping for here. Hot Rod magazine was involved with it. You could run anything from street cars up to Pro Stock or Alcohol Dragster/Funny Car. Everything was adjustable - bore/stroke, cylinder head flow, cam profiles, gear ratios, stall speed, weight distribution, suspension, tires, all of it. I used to go on the Comp Cams website and look up different camshaft profiles to try in the game. I was 12 years old and it's where I learned how things worked at a basic level.
Once you built your car, you could run brackets, index racing at any ET, or heads-up. Pro tree or full tree. Delay boxes. Throttle stops. Everything you could possibly want and
it was 1998.
There are a zillion goofy NASCAR games nobody plays. The reason iRacing is so popular it because it's a simulator. Here's to hoping that this gets a little more detailed than "mash the button and steer".