2006 NASCAR Nextel Cup Series (Start Your Engines!)

The 2006 NASCAR Nextel Cup Series was the 58th season of professional stock car racing in the United States and the 35th modern-era Cup series season.

This was the first season without Dale Earnhardt since 1974.

Technical changes
The next major round of model changes took place in 2006. The Ford Taurus, which had been run since 1998, was pulled from NASCAR competition after being discontinued, and was replaced by the brand-new Ford Fusion (a few underfunded teams continued using the Taurus).

Chevrolet upgraded the Monte Carlo to the Monte Carlo SS, marking the first time the "SS" moniker had been used in NASCAR since 1989.

Dodge made multiple changes to the problematic Charger. While the changes helped, especially on the superspeedways, Pacific Coast Racing still refused to run the model on the intermediates and instead continued using the 2004 Stratus. Penske and Petty also used the Stratus at certain intermediates such as California and Texas, before Dodge threatened to pull factory support from them; this caused Roger Penske to accuse Dodge of playing favorites with PCR, and he threatened to go back to Ford. This, in turn, caused Dodge to go back to the drawing board to completely rework the Charger nose for 2007.