2024 Nashville Race Report

The 2024 Nashville race report has 20 lead changes, a record number of overtime attempts, and a record number of cautions.

2024 Nashville Race Overview

As always, we begin with the lead/caution-o-gram. This graph gives us a broad overview of the entire race.

Cautions

If there’s one thing we had this week, it is cautions. There were 15 this race, the most of the four Cup Series races at Nashville Superspeedway. The previous record was 11 cautions, at the first race in 2021.

Nashville also wins the dubious honor of having the second-most cautions of any race this year. Texas holds the record with 16.

Excluding two stage-end cautions, the Ally 400 had 13 unplanned cautions over 331 laps. I show their breakdown in the table below.

Accidents and spins accounted for 73.4% of all the cautions. Erik Jones’ crash in Stage 3 was a right-front flat and likely due to having run over something on track.

There were 79 caution laps total, comprising 23.9% of the race. The two stage-end cautions were each six laps, so 67 laps (84.8%) were lost to unplanned cautions.

Lead Changes

There were 20 lead changes in this race, one fewer than last year. But last year, 13 of the 21 lead changes were due to green- and yellow-flag pit cycles.

I summarize this year’s lead changes and how they happened in the table below.

Lead taken during green-flag or yellow-flag pitstops indicate that the lead changed only because the leader pitted.

This is different from ‘lead taken on pit road under yellow’. That means a pit crew got their driver out ahead of others. That type of lead change is earned.

Finally, Beat to the S/F line is there because NASCAR now awards laps led to a second-place driver who beats the first-place driver to the line on the restart. If the second-place driver retains the lead, it’s a lead taken on restarts. If the second-place driver doesn’t hold the lead, it’s a beat to the start/finish line.

In this race, A.J. Allmendinger beat Ryan Blaney to the line on a restart, but Blaney regained the lead. Under NASCAR’s old rules, there would be two fewer lead changes.

Last year’s race featured six green-flag passes and only one lead change on a restart. Then again, the 2023 race only had four cautions.

This year’s race featured nine different leaders.

And that’s your 2024 Nashville race report.