Homestead-Miami Race Report

This was the first time in Homestead-Miami Speedway‘s NASCAR career that it wasn’t one of the last races of the season. Here’s the Homestead-Miami Race Report: the race in pictures.

Cautions

The ubiquitous pop-up thunderstorms and lightning strikes delayed the start of the race, but once it got started, it kept going pretty well.

Almost all of the cautions in this race were due to the control tower or Mother Nature. We had one accident and one spin and that was pretty much it. We ran 10.1% of the race under caution, compared to a track average of 13.3%.

In terms of caution laps,

• Out of 27 caution laps, drivers were only responsible for 7 (26%).
• The control tower was responsible for 12 (44%)
• And Mother Nature takes the blame for the rest

If we look at it in terms of cautions, drivers, the control tower and Mom Nature each caused 2/6 (33%) of the cautions.

This is consistent with the decreasing number of accidents and overall cautions in the stage racing age.

Leaders

Denny Hamlin won the race and overwhelmingly led the largest number of laps. (137/267=51.3%) Hamlin’s margin of victory was 0.895-seconds, which is on the lower side of normal. More about that tomorrow in the trend analysis.

The next leading-est driver, Ryan Blaney, led 70 laps (26.2% of the race.) Only five other drivers led, although

• Keselowski only led one yellow-flag lap
• Kyle Busch led two green-flag laps
• Tyler Reddick led three green-flag laps, the first green-flag laps he’s led in his NASCAR Cup career.

That gives us five quality leaders, according to the definition that a quality leader has to have led more than 2 GF laps.

There wasn’t much interesting in the penalty reports this week, so that’s the Homestead-Miami race report for the twelfth race of the season.

Tomorrow, I’ll compare this race to other Homestead-Miami races. Did changing the race schedule (and removing the stakes of being the championship race) impact the numbers?