NASCAR Thunder 2004 (PlayStation)

NASCAR Thunder 2004 was the last NASCAR game for PlayStation (based on the last year for the NASCAR Winston Cup Series name, no less), still based on the NASCAR 2001 codebase.

Unused Audio#

John Andretti has a leftover MRN, voiced by Joe Moore (but not PRN, for use at SMI-owned tracks) voice commentary clip, likely from NASCAR Thunder 2003. Andretti was replaced by Petty Enterprises from the #43 car mid-season by Christian Fittipaldi, a change so late that Fittipaldi is not mentioned by name by any of the radio announcers. (In other versions of the game, Fittipaldi's car is referred as "Cheerios Dodge", referring to the sponsor and make of the #43 car.)

Unused Driver Profile Data#

NASCAR 2001, the base game for all NASCAR Thunder games on the PlayStation, displays the driver's sponsor and rookie year in addition to their current team, birthday and hometown. While the former two information is no longer shown in the NASCAR Thunder games, data for the driver's sponsor and rookie year are still stored in the driver profile, present in 0x2C127 on the console's RAM, while in the game's menu. The information appears to be mostly sorted in numeric order, with some exceptions; additionally, Busch Series drivers and legend drivers are mingled together.

Note that the sponsor information only apply to primary paint schemes and follows the spelling of how it appears on the profile data, and that the debut year of Busch Series drivers represent their full-time Winston Cup debut year; as such, they are set to 2003 if the Busch Series driver had never raced in the Cup Series full-time up to that point.

For readability purposes, driver names and numbers has been added, and this information is served in a table form.