It’s been a long time since the Ford Mustang took to the track in NASCAR’s highest echelon of racing, the Sprint Car Cup. We reported last week that Ford was supposedly considering bringing the Mustang back to the Sprint Car Cup after the success they had with the Mustang in the lower ranks of NASCAR’s Nationwide series.

Now ESPN reports that Ford has actually submitted the 2013 Mustang to NASCAR to approval to eventually replace the Fusion that has been on the track for almost a decade.

Now you’d think changing cars would be easy, but you’d be wrong. Ford has to prove to NASCAR that the Sprint Cup Mustang would be competitive with other cars it’d share the track with. Sure, underneath it all it will still be a Car of Tomorrow that all NASCAR teams use, but with NASCAR’s move to fuel injection there’s sure to be some bigger changes to the cars.

We’re done holding out hope that NASCAR will ever return to the days of real stock car racing. However, we’d much rather see a Mustang duking it out than a Ford Fusion. If we can get GM, Chrysler and yes, even Toyota to follow suit and submit performance car models for the NASCAR series, then maybe there is hope yet for this high speed sport of left turns. If they did that, well we might stop watching old reruns of NASCAR and start watching it live again.