A Numbers Geek Looks at Las Vegas

A couple observations about history at Las Vegas…

Pole Speeds

Pole speeds hovered inthe 170-175 mph until 2007. After the 2006 race, LVMS changed over to progressive banking, which increased the banking overall and changed the amount of banking in different lanes of the track. This added about 10 mph to the pole speed and it’s been on an uphill trajectory ever since. With the lighter car, it will be interesting to see what type of speeds they reach this year.

Cautions

The maximum number of cautions we’ve seen was in 2009, with 14, but recent years have averaged around four to six.

Best Drivers

It’s tempting to note who has the most wins – but the important thing is really how many times they won relative to how many times they’ve raced. In this case, Jimmie Johnson wins both categories – 4 wins, which means he wins approximately 30 percent of the time he races there. Keselowski, KyBu, Stewart and Gordon all have one win, but the percentage win rate ranges from about 15% (Keselowski) to 5% (Gordon).  Get well Kyle!

Qualifying

After last week’s embarrassment at Atlanta, there will be extra emphasis on qualifying. Like most 1.5-mile tracks, where you start does have some influence on where you finish, so a good qualifying spot is sort of important.

Here’s a graph of starting position vs. finishing position for last year’s race. I’ve highlighted the cars that finished 10 or more laps down. Those cars are usually in an accident or have a major parts failure, so they should be noted in case they skew the result.

You’ll notice there’s a general trend that suggests where you start influences where you finish, although the correlation seems stronger at the lower positions. The first 10-15 starting positions seem pretty random.  (Compare this to what you find at a plate track like Daytona, where staring position is pretty much entirely irrelevant. There’s also a more thorough discussion of how to analyze these types of plots in that blog). I made the graph for 2013, but it looks pretty much the same as for 2014, not I’m not posting it here.

Will be on SiriusXM NASCAR radio this Friday (March 6th) sometime between 3 and 7 East to talk about aging and the effect it has on drivers.