Atlanta races aren’t known for having a lot of cautions, but last Sunday’s race had even lower caution figures. Here’s the Atlanta Caution-O-Gram.
There were no cautions in the third stage and one in each of the first two. The only non-competition/stage end cautions were both for spins.
I do wonder if drivers are being extra careful given the lack of practices or qualifying for these races.
Five cautions accounted for a total of 24 laps out of 325 run. Competition-mandated cautions accounted for 66.7% of all caution laps. While this isn’t the lowest seen at Atlanta in recent years, it’s definitely lower than in past stage races. (Cautions have gone down over the last few years, even though stage racing adds two additional cautions.
The average amount of a race run under caution at Atlanta is 11.2%. Sunday’s race was only 7.4, which is not very different from the last three races there. I included only spring races in this graph.
The absence of accidents accounts for the large percentage of cars finishing the race. Only two cars from a field of forty didn’t finish, and neither were the cars that spun.
The one place we saw something different was in the percentage of cars that finished on the lead lap: only 25%. Last year was anomalously high, with 62% of the cars finishing, but the last few races before that have been in the 30 and 40% range.
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