Do Drivers Slow Down When They Get Older?

NOTE: I’ve revisited this topic in a more-recent blog that has additional data. I’d encourage you to look there, as well

There are a lot of things people say in NASCAR that have been said for so long that nobody really thinks about where they came from – or if they’re true.

As you get older, you get more and more sensitive to generalizations people make about getting old.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve  heard someone says that drivers get slower (or don’t win as much) as they get older.  I started wondering if that was actually true.

The thing about data is that you have to think about what it means.  For example, what does ‘slow down’ mean?  Qualifying speed?  Well, you don’t get points for qualifying first – we’re really talking about being successful at racing.

What racers really care about is winning – and if you can’t win, at least running consistently well.  So I decided a good measure of  “success” would be wins,  top fives, top tens and rank at the end of the year. I used data from racing-reference.info to consider career statistics for drivers and look for patterns.

Given that time is finite, I picked some representative drivers.  I wanted drivers with long careers, so I had data points at either end of the age spectrum.  I wanted champions, so Johnson, Gordon, Kenseth, Stewart were obvious.  I added Dale Jarrett because he had a long career and – hey, I just like Dale Jarrett, OK?  I also wanted some youth, so I added Kyle Busch, Kasey Kahne and Carl Edwards.  I added Ryan Newman because he made a big splash the first couple years of his career and Jeff Burton because (in addition to a long career), he’s had a really interesting career.  Finally, I added Mark Martin because – well – he’s been around forever.

The Data

Jarrett_WinsT5T10withAge

Let’s look at Jarrett’s data first.  The number of wins is in blue, top fives in red and top tens in green.  I’ve indicated the year he won the championship with an arrow (which represents his best year in terms of top fives and tens, but not his best year in terms of number of wins.  Also worth noting:  He didn’t run full seasons his first three and his last two years.  But even if you ignore those, there’s a pretty clear pattern of improvement and then tailing off.

Stewart_WinsT5T10

Jarrett started driving in 1984 at age 27 – the same year Kyle Busch was born.  Today, drivers get into the Cup series a little younger.

Tony Stewart didn’t start Cup until he was 28, though, so you might expect him to have a similar profile to Jarrett.

Not at all!  Stewart has been remarkably consistent over his Sprint Cup career.   The two arrows show Stewart’s first and last championship years.  The third was at age 34.  Stewart doesn’t seem to have any peaks or valley, even when he changed teams.   Jimmie Johnson’s numbers look very similar to Stewart’s.  Kenseth’s is a little more up-and-down, but again, there aren’t noticeable peaks.  (I know, I should have done Kurt Busch to see whether this is a mark of a champion!)  I’ll get there…

Each of the other drivers have similarly different (?) graphs.  Newman peaked at age 25 and he’s been up and down since then (with a slight upward trend since he joined SHR.)  Edwards is very up-and-down.    Martin’s is a little complicated because he had a couple years he didn’t drive all the races. Even so, there’s a broad peak from about age 30 to age 40 and everything after that is pretty oscillatory.

Burton_WinsTop5sTopTens_Annotated

Here’s one of the complicating factors, though.  Look at the data for Jeff Burton – he’s got two peaks and they are very clearly divided by the year where he switched from Roush to Childress.  Similarly, Kasey Kahne’s numbers show a big upswing when he started driving for HMS.

And then there’s Jeff Gordon… I spent a lot of time trying to overlay life events on his graph – could you correlate performance to marriage, divorce, birth of children.  In short, no you can’t.  Gordon shows a broad peak from age 22 to age 28-29 and it’s been a little disappointing since then.  There is the occasional very good year (six wins in 2007), but it’s mostly down from his heyday.  Since he has the same equipment as Jimmie Johnson, it’s hard to make an argument that it has to do with the company falling down on technology.  Sorry – wish I had better news there.

Umm… So… You Gonna Tell Us Anything Useful?

This, of course, raises the important question of “How are you going to come to any type of conclusion if everyone’s graphs look very different?”

Which is a very good question.  I played around with the data and I finally came up with an idea.  What if I take a bunch of drivers and simply add together how many wins were had by drivers that were aged 21, 22, …?  I did that.

Then I realized that was stupid.  Why?  Because that’s really measuring how many drivers of each age there were.  It looked very Gaussian and that’s what made me smack my forehead and realize I was being stupid.  What I had to do was find the average number of wins:  How many wins by 28-year olds divided by the number of drivers in my sample who were 28 years old.  Now this has some promise…

AvgWinsperDrivervsAge_CUM

There’s still a lot of scatter in the data (I haven’t had time to increase the numbers of drivers), but two clear trends emerge.  The top graph is a plot of the average wins per driver vs. driver age.  Jeff Gordon is messing things up a little with his 13 wins in 1998.  He won just about 40 percent of all the races that year.   But still – if you look at the winner for a given race, the odds suggest that he or she will be younger rather than older.  The outlier at age 50.  That is Mr. Martin.  He won five races that year and I only have data for one other 50-year old driver.

The lower graph shows the number of top tens (blue) and top fives (red).  Those numbers are both surprisingly flat until you hit about 40 years old, at which point they start going down.

Now you have to be careful – this tells you the behavior of a group.  It doesn’t tell you the behavior of any one particular driver.  When doctors tell you things like survival rates for cancer, they don’t tell you you have a 50% chance of being cured.  They tell you that, out of people like you, 50 percent of them are cured.  Your individual rate could be 10 percent or 90 percent.  Of course, that’s not something we can measure.

Just like we can’t measure luck – if you get taken out by an inexperienced driver, that really doesn’t have anything to do with your age.

Why?

Now there’s the big question.  It is a fact that our reaction rates slow down as we age.  But we also gain experience, which may allow us to make better decisions.  The relatively flat profile of a driver like Stewart doesn’t seem to indicate any decline over the years.  The Stewart of his first championship is just as good as the Stewart of his second or his third.

As Silly Season progresses, teams are going to be more likely to look for a younger driver (like Kyle Larson) than take a chance on a veteran like Bobby Labonte.  The older you get, the more you have to prove yourself.

10 Comments

  1. I haven’t tried plotting it but it wouldn’t surprise me if changes to the car (tire, etc.) impacts a driver’s performance, with older drivers having a harder time adapting to a car that is radically different from the car(s) they had been previously driving. Younger drivers, who don’t have as many years in a particular car, might have a better time adapting to the new specs. Could this possibly explain why Johnson, Edwards and Kyle Busch had great win totals in the COT, while drivers like Gordon and Earnhardt didn’t do so well?

  2. I think that Steve may have something. I remember when the asphalt modifieds went from straight axles to independent front suspensions, several of the experienced (older) drivers had trouble adapting. It was a different driving style required to get the maximum out of the car.

  3. Jimmie Johnson without Chad Knaus wouldn’t look as spectacular. Look how many crew chiefs Gordon has had. None of them of the calibre of Knaus.

    Sometimes bad years happen througout a team. We’ve seen with RCR and Roush where all the cars are just bad that year. Not on the driver, just a teamwide epidemic.

    Bobby Labonte started a decline when he was around 40. His last couple years at Gibbs-present have been painful.

    • Agreed on all points. The idea of combining all the data over multiple years is that the effects of things like crappy years for entire companies should average out. Ideally, I would do this for forty drivers or so… however, I have this day job that they insist I do if they’re going to pay me!
      On average, we see drivers slow down as they age; however, individual drivers exhibit trends that are all over the map. It’s the averaged data that seems to me to be the most interesting.

  4. Gordon had Ray Evernham, which someone could easily argue was as good as Knaus. The competition seems higher in Johnson’s championship years but he never won 13 races even with the better equipment at Hendrick has had in the past 10 or so years.

    As for Mark Martin, he also raced in Nationwide/Busch as well as IROC. He won IROC champtionships well into his late 40s. There’s something to be said about winning against the best of the best in equal cars many times. If only he raced for Hendrick or someone better he’d probably have a few championships.

    As Steve mentioned, I’ve thought for years the CoT was a reason for Gordon’s drop in performance. Even compared to the late 90s the cars are so much different. Riding on bump stops, aero downforce playing a larger factor, the list could go on and on. I’m sure if we stuck Petty in one today’s cars he’d have issues too.

    Reaction probably has a much to do with the general trend. It’s just a fact of life. On the other hand I think it also partly explains for Stewart’s steady pace. He races other cars and keeps more areas of his racing talents in top shape and has been able to be just as good as when he was 30. To add onto this, a slightly loose race car is a fast car and I bet that takes better reflexes and more aggression to tame. Those are two things to naturally drop as people age, especially in men.

  5. I totally agree with you on all the points that you have tried to explain and show through graphical representation and i also know that sometimes it is the technology used in the car that affects the performance of the driver.But this is also very true that age has a lot to do with how you perform.As one grows older the responses tend to slow down which in turn will affect the performance.Sometimes due to strenuous work your eye sight also is affected and so in turn is your performance.Maybe that is the the reason you love speed when we are young but settle for moderate limits,as we age.

  6. Yeah!Steve,I totally agree with you that making changes to the car would certainly impact the drivers performance.It is true that older drivers may find it little harder to adapt to a car which is different from their own but their driving expertise and years of experience is certainly going to help them tied over small hassles,and help them perform better and showcase great wins

  7. The article does not answer the question about growing older affecting the number of wins.It is apparent that nascar drivers do see a noticeable decline in wins once they reach 40. It probably is a number of reasons: drive to win drops with successful career, millions in the bank, risk taking on track, and growth of family help to cause driver to settle for top ten finish over pushing for a win.

    • I’m not sure I understand your comment. The last graphs clearly show that — on average — productivity goes down as you get older.

      I did include a link at the top to a more recent study — but it’s still 2015. I should go back and look at this topic again because there’s much more data that could be added.

      Thanks for finding the blog!

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