NR2003

‎Nascar Racing 2003 aka NR2003 was released in Febuary 2003 by Papyrus, who are known for making Grand Prix Legends and iRacing. The game is still considered to be one of the best Oval racing games to date. And eventhough it's pretty rare and therefore hard to get a legit copy, you'd probably still pay less money than you would getting a similar experience in iRacing.

Due to having the easy ability to find versions of questionable legality online, great ingame tutorials and very good AI, this is the game to play if you wanna get into oval racing

Technical Fixes

Chances are you are using a modern version of Windows. While NR2003 has some issues with those, it's possible to fix them quite easily.

Making the game work

If the game crashes as soon as you try to enter the track, you need to replace the .exe file with the one provided in the NR2003 Encyclopedia further down this page.

If that solution doesn't work, you need to disable a Windows setting called DEP by opening a command prompt as administrator and typing in the command bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOff and then restarting your PC. Keep in mind that some (Multiplayer) games might require DEP in order to work properly, so to enable it again simply type in the same command replacing AlwaysOff with AlwaysOn and restart your PC afterwards.

Blurry Texture Fix

If you are racing against a lot of cars, the textures will most likely appear blurry. In order to fix this, you'll need to edit 3 .ini files. These are core.ini, rend_dxg.ini (potentially called rend_ogl.ini or rend_d3d.ini) and player.ini. The first two can be found in the base folder where you installed NR2003, the third one is found in the folder of your profile, found within the players folder.

This website will calculate how you should edit certain values in these files, depending on how much memory your graphics card has and what resolution you use.

Graphics before and after the fix (note the Papyrus car and RVs next to the track)

Keep in mind that the blurry textures might return and you need to redo the fix. This is most likely when you change settings in the Config program (like changing resolution) or when you change profiles

NR2003 Encylcopedia

Most popular racing games have big mod communities and NR2003 is no exception. However, many good mods have been lost to the winds of time with many old sites closing down and being inacessible nowadays.

Luckily, we have the NR2003 Encyclopedia! A collection of mods and miscellaneous files to make the game better. Definitely worth checking out

Installing mods

Installing mods is very simple. Track mods go into the tracks folder and car mods go into the series folder.

You can then select the tracks like usual and switch the series with the arrows on the bottom of the main menu

Cars won't show up

Most car mods come with skinpacks for different seasons, which is why they won't work right away. To fix this, open the folder of the series and then rename the folder of the season you want to use to cars.