Dodge, General Motors and Toyota: Y’all have been officially put on notice.

Ford brought out its big guns Tuesday when it unveiled the 2013 Fusion NASCAR Sprint Cup car at Charlotte Motor Speedway, and for the first time in a long time you are actually going to see a stock car that looks like a … wait for it … a stock car. Everybody else better do the same.

With the ’13 Fusion, Ford has given race fans what they want: a car that looks like the car they can buy off the lot of their local dealer. Fans want to identify with the racers and their cars and, while I know that Harry Hogg was right in “Days of Thunder” when he said “there’s nothing stock about a stock car,” it doesn’t hurt to make people think there is.

“Fans have a relationship with the drivers, the teams and the sponsors,” said David Ragan, who drove a Ford last year for Roush Fenway Racing and will drive one for Front Row Motorsports in 2012. “Now they can have a relationship with the cars again.”

Director of Racing for Ford Motor Company Jamie Allison said that the resemblance to the street car by the NASCAR car is no coincidence.

“This (the race car) looks like a sports sedan,” Allison said. “This is what a car looks like on the street.

“The more we went away from ‘stock car’ racing, the more the role of design diminished. However, the role of the aerodynamicist and the motorsports engineer increased because we were designing purpose-built race cars.”

The new car represents a different philosophy for Ford in racing.

When Ford introduced the Taurus as its NASCAR entry in 1998, replacing the Thunderbird, the race car was designed primarily by its flagship teams — Roush Racing and Penske Racing South. This time, the race car was purpose-built by Ford and its engineers to maintain more of the brand identity that used to be evident on the race versions of the Galaxy, Torino and Thunderbird.

Will it be a world-beater? Who knows. At this point it doesn’t matter. What matters to Ford is that Ford is putting a race car on the track that will help it sell cars.

What matters to me as a race fan is that this is the first step in some brand differentiation for NASCAR. In 2013, gone will be the common template. Strip this bad boy of the headlight and taillight decals and I still will know that it is a Ford Fusion.

I won’t have to look real hard to tell if it’s a Dodge or a Chevrolet or a Toyota. Especially if the other brands don’t step it up the way Ford has.

Contact Andy Cagle at andycagle@earthlink.net.