Race 2020-32: Roval Rundown by the Numbers

The Charlotte Roval was a runaway win for Chase Elliott, with a margin of victory of almost four seconds. But there’s more to the story of this race. Here’s your Roval Rundown for race 2020-32.

Leading

The Lead-O-Gram shows how 11 different drivers led the race, with those that did well in the first (wet) stage mostly fading away in later stages.

• The exception to the above statement, of course, is Chase Elliott, who was MIA during stage 2, but came back really strong at the end.
• William Byron made a good showing in stage 2 and the early part of stage 3.

The detailed lap leader chart also shows some interesting trends. I’ve got a whole post on why you have to be this detailed when looking at these stats.

We have 11 distinct leaders, although Kyle Busch only led during cautions, so 10 quality leaders. Of note:

• Ryan Preece led eight quality laps.
• Keselowski led the first 7 laps and nothing afterward
• Despite starting on the pole, Denny Hamlin didn’t lead a single lap.
• Elliott and Byron both led 27 laps,

Accidents & Cautions

• On average, 16.8% of a race at the Charlotte Roval is run under caution. Last Sunday’s race came in at 14.7%, the same as the inaugural race
• There were 9 cautions (which is right at the average)

Here’s the Caution-O-Gram

• 2 stage-end cautions
• 1 competition caution
• 3 stalled car cautions
• 1 accident
• 3 debris cautions

NASCAR only flags accidents if they produce a caution. The unusually large number of debris cautions tells you that there was a lot of contact that didn’t stop the race. The low number of official “accidents” doesn’t reflect how much carnage there was.

You would think that would mean all road courses — because of their size and how spread out the drivers get — would have low accident numbers. You’d be wrong. The Roval only has two other races, but they were chock full of accidents

The number of cars involved in accidents was also very low this race: just two.

Penalties

Something I missed during the race is that there were a lot of penalties. 22 of them, to be exact.

• 10 speeding on pit road penalties
• Ryan Newman had four of the 22 total penalties

So there’s your Roval race rundown!