Your Yearly Reminder: It is Too Early To Lose Sleep Over Points

Every year, this blog performs a public service by reminding fans not to lose sleep over points your favorite driver has (or hasn’t) accumulated early in the season. This year, however, there’s a special caveat.

So let’s examine why you shouldn’t panic if your driver is low in points. Also why you shouldn’t feel too confident if your driver is way out ahead.

Reason #1 Not To Lose Sleep Over Points: The Law of Small-N

One of the things people who have recently discovered Excel spreadsheets and now fancy themselves statisticians often miss is that the number of numbers matters.

Would you prefer to get a grade on just a midterm and final? Or would you rather have a weekly evaluation so that one bad day can’t tank your entire semester? Which number more accurately reflects your abilities?

How Points Work

Let’s start with the constraints. The maximum number of points a driver can score in a single race is 61. That’s up one point from last year because NASCAR will now give the driver who posts the fastest lap of the race one point.

Over 290 races in the stage-racing era (2017-present), 31 drivers have earned 60 + points. That’s 10.7% of all races. (For those curious, Martin Truex Jr. has eight perfect races, Kyle Larson six, and Kevin Harvick four.)

Each driver’s points total goes up each week. (Unless you are penalized.) By the end of the year, top drivers typically earn 1000+ points. But as that total rises, the maximum 60 points per race becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of the total points.

I’ll focus here only on points earned in races. This does not include any numerical contortions due to the playoff structure. It’s simple total numbers of points earned for finishes and stage placement.

Average Points Per Race

The average points per race is the best way to see what I’m talking about. That’s simply the total number of points divided by the number of races. It’s become a popular metric for race strategizing in the playoff era.

The graph below shows the average points per race for Christopher Bell in 2024.

Let’s look at how Bell’s graph evolved over the first few weeks.

• Bell came in third at the Daytona 500 and earned 44 points.
• The next week, however, he crashed at Atlanta and earned only three points. His average points per race is now (44 + 3)/2 = 23.5
• At Las Vegas, Bell finished 33rd with five points. His average reached its season low of 17.3 and put him in 21st position in the overall points rankings.
• He won Phoenix and earned 50 points. That brought Bell to a total of 102 points and and 25.5 average points per race.

You’ll note that winning the fourth race of the season only raised his average finish from 17.3 to 25.5, a change of 8.2 average points per race.

The Law of Small n

We typically use ‘n’ to represent the number of something. Here, that would be the number of races. When there are only a small number of races, each subsequent race can cause very big changes. When n becomes large, the effect is muted.

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For example:

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C. Bells’s curve doesn’t even start to flatten out until about race 18. He has an average points per race of 26.9 after the 18th race of the season. But he keeps improving. At the end of the season he’s up to an average of 29.0 points per race.

Every Driver Does It

Bell is not unique. Here are the same graphs for three other drivers that show different sorts of variations.

• Brad Keselowski had to dig himself out of a hole, but once he did, he was pretty consistent.
• Denny Hamlin had a lot of ups and downs in 2024.
• Ross Chastain showed a steady decline over the season (up until winning the last race of the year in Phoenix.)

So I hope it’s pretty clear from these graphs that the first few weeks of the season are not good predictors for the rest of the season. And show you why you shouldn’t lose sleep over points for a few weeks, at least.

Reason #2 Not To Lose Sleep Over the Points

When I first started this yearly service announcement, I recommended waiting to worry about points until after the first five to seven races. But that was before the radical changes to the NASCAR schedule.

For my first colorful graph of the season, I present the track types raced for the first five races of the year from 2017-2025.

Back in the day you could pretty much predict where the NASCAR Cup Series would be each week because they pretty much went to the same tracks at the same time each year. There were never more than two road courses a year and four superspeedways a year.

That was still pretty much the case in 2017 – 2019. The first five races were a superspeedway and four ovals. Two of those four were 1.5-mile tracks, which dominated the NASCAR schedule then.

During the pandemic in 2021, a road course was introduced as the second race. Road courses also tend to jumble up points because some drivers are really strong at those tracks and others less so. (Road courses have also gone from being relatively staid events to crash fests in the last decade.)

In 2022, two drafting tracks appeared in the first five races, and this year, the first three races are two superspeedways an a road course. We don’t get to the first oval until next week at Phoenix.

So this year, I think the time to not lose sleep over points is extended until the ninth or tenth week of racing. But even then, be a little careful. Remember how everyone was wringing their hands last year because Ford didn’t win any of the first 10 races?

They went on to win the championship.

Bonus Chart

Just to show you how consistent the schedule for the first five races was for many years, here’s the same graph as above, but going back to 2001. I often use 2001 because that is the first year NASCAR had 36 races.

Track Types by Race Number and Year

Race Number	1	2	3	4	5
2001	SS	SH	I	I	SH
2002	SS	SH	I	I	SH
2003	SS	SH	I	I	SH
2004	SS	SH	I	I	SH
2005	SS	O	I	I	SSH
2006	SS	O	I	I	SSH
2007	SS	O	I	I	SSH
2008	SS	O	I	I	SSH
2009	SS	O	I	I	SSH
2010	SS	O	I	I	SSH
2011	SS	SH	I	SSH	O
2012	SS	SH	I	SSH	O
2013	SS	SH	I	SSH	O
2014	SS	SH	I	SSH	O
2015	SS	I	I	SH	O
2016	SS	I	I	SH	O
2017	SS	I	I	SH	O
2018	SS	I	I	SH	O
2019	SS	I	I	SH	O
2020	SS	I	O	SH	SH
2021	SS	RC	I	I	SH
2022	SS	O	I	SH	SS
2023	SS	O	I	SH	SS
2024	SS	SS	I	SH	SSH
2025	SS	SS	RC	SH	I

The moral of our story today: Past performance does not predict future behavior.