2012 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series (Start Your Engines!)

The 2012 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series was the 64th season of professional stock car racing in the United States and the 41st modern-era Cup series season.

2012 was the final season that the original SAFER Car design–which debuted in the 1997 season–were used in competition, as the New Body Program was completed in 2013 with the debut of a new carbody that better reflected car design trends of the 2010s.

Complete schedule
^ The No. 33 changed owners in April. Joe Falk acquired the assets and ownership and was listed as owner after Martinsville, and also switched from Chevrolet to Dodge; however Childress still fielded the car in races which Austin Dillon competed in.

Technology
On January 21, 2011, NASCAR announced that the Sprint Cup Series would change to electronic fuel injection from carburetors, which had been used since 1949, for the 2012 season. During the 2010 off-season, NASCAR had discussed doing the change during the 2011 season; however, in the January 21 announcements, Robin Pemberton stated, "We don't anticipate any points races this year, or races with fuel injection. It'll be a year dedicated to finetuning and getting the process down, whether it be inspection or the team side of it, with building engines. That's going along quite well." Afterward, John Darby, NASCAR's managing director of competition, said he hoped to debut the electronic fuel injection engine at least in the second race of the 2012 season.

Technical changes
As the final year for the original SAFER Car body design that had been in use since its introduction in 1997 (the implementation of the Approved Body Configuration in 2003 nonwithstanding), the only changes made by Chevrolet, Ford, Dodge, and Toyota were minute details that only hardcore fans would notice.

Pontiac had pulled factory support following the 2003 season, with a few small and underfunded teams running them in 2004. Kennedy Racing was the sole holdout for running Pontiacs full-time in the Cup Series, doing so with their own funds and their own body panels. They would update their Pontiacs to reflect their showroom counterparts, and in 2011 and 2012, to keep their cars legal under NASCAR's homologation rules, they rebranded their cars as the G6, one of the models that the reconstituted Pontiac was offering at the time. 2012 marked the final year Kennedy Racing could legally run Pontiacs, as Pontiac had not participated in the New Body Program, and the use of the new body would be strictly enforced. Throughout 2012, Melvin Kennedy and his daughter Louise ran special paint schemes commemorating Pontiac's final departure from NASCAR. Kennedy Racing would switch to Chevrolet for 2013. Pontiac, meanwhile, wouldn't be gone from NASCAR long, as in 2015, they returned with full factory support in the Sprint Cup and Xfinity Series, Kennedy Racing being one of the first teams to make the switch.