NASCAR Thunder 2004: Todd Bodine No. 54 Gameplay (Mod)

AJFails uploaded a new Thunder 2004 car to his Discord server late last night, so you know what that means. This time, it's Todd Bodine's No. 54 National Guard Ford, which means that we officially have every full-time 2003 Cup entry represented in NASCAR Thunder 2004 (I think I said earlier on Twitter that we were also missing Larry Foyt's No. 14, but, after looking into it, I found out that A.J. Foyt Racing switched to the No. 50 for a few races mid-way through 2003, and the Nos. 14 and 50 were classified as separate entries in that year's owners points, so neither car was technically full-time - but that's a story for another day). This car is interesting in that there are leftover assets suggesting that Bodine's No. 54 was supposed to be included in the game. Not a whole lot, though - as far as I can tell, there are only three assets of Todd's No. 54 still in the game: a blank placeholder rookie texture (plus the corresponding placeholder Allies/Rivals screen graphic that AJ found), and the starting lineup intro you hear at 1:03.

Some of you might know that, in the base game, Hermie Sadler has Todd Bodine's stats through 2001. Interestingly, there is actually a duplicate set of Bodine's stats in the game's files, and this set goes through 2002. It really makes me wonder just how far the 54 was in development if EA even had Bodine's completed stats ready to go.

2003 was Todd's third full year with Haas-Carter Motorsports, which had re-branded during the off-season to BelCar Motorsports after merging with Sam Belnavis. That season was mostly just mediocre, both for BelCar and Bodine, with Bodine only nabbing only one Top 10 (a P8 in the July Pocono race), with BelCar shutting down at the end of 2003. Bodine also had a very nasty wreck at the August Michigan race, with his car nearly flipping over after making contact with Kurt Busch and Kenny Wallace.

The first lap of this race was... something else, let's put it that way. I've been playing a lot of NASCAR 06 lately, so I forgot that, for this game, the default control for the accelerator is X, not R2, so I spent a lot longer than I would have liked holding R2 to no avail. Oops. And then Bobby Labonte tried to make it 3-wide by going in the grass, sending me into Jamie McMurray and Robby Gordon. I wasn't exactly happy about being raced like that, so I gave Bobby a little nudge on Lap 2 to let him know where we stand.

I mentioned in the Jimmy Spencer video that some drivers have different respect ratings for other drivers (e.g., Kevin Harvick and Greg Biffle hate each other, to reflect their run-in at Bristol in 2002), and that you can adjust these ratings. So I went ahead and made Todd and Brett Bodine allies. I know that Kurt and Kyle Busch are allies by default in NASCAR 06 onwards, so it only seemed fair to make the Bodine brothers allies, too (thank you for the suggestion, Mark Oliveras).

Links:
AJ's channel:    / @ajfails  
AJ's video on texture mods:    • Nascar Thunder 2004 Modding - Texture Pack...  
AJ's Discord:   / discord