Does Daytona Qualifying Really Matter?

Okay, it obviously does if you’re one of the cars that fails to make the race. But beyond that- given the huge amount of attention that’s been given to the ’embarrassment’ that was this year’s qualifying – does where you start make any different as to where you finish?

To investigate, I plotted the starting positions against the finishing positions for each race at Daytona. I wanted to do both the July and the February race to see if there was any difference given the different formats of the qualifying (regular qualifying+ duels vs. regular qualifying).

If there were a trend, you would expect a pattern to emerge on the graph. For example, starting position tends to be very important at mile-and-a-half tracks. Although there’s some scatter in the data, there’s a pretty clear trend that the people who start toward the front tend to finish toward the front. Same for the folks who start in the back.

It’s always interesting to look at the points that don’t follow the trend. For example, the point in the upper right circled in red is a car that had engine problems and didn’t finish the race.

The point that is the furthest from the line (furthest defined as the perpendicular distance between the point and the line) is the one circled in crimson and labeled “Harvick”. Despite leading 23 laps, Harvick had axle/hub trouble and spent 30 laps in the garage. His 41st place finish didn’t reflect how good his car was – at least until it broke.

Similarly, the other crimson-circled data points represent cars that ran more than 3 laps down due to problems in the pits, mechanical difficulties, or accidents that didn’t result in the car leaving the race, but did enough damage to require time in the garage or pits fixing the car.

Here’s similar data for Phoenix – it shows the trend even more strongly. If you started well and your name wasn’t Kurt Busch (engine failure), you finished pretty well. If you started in the back, that’s pretty much where you stayed.

So if this post is about Daytona, why am I going on and on about Las Vegas and Phoenix?  Well…

I wanted to show you what you were looking for first. And the analogous plot for Daytona is a mess. You might not realize that it means there isn’t a trend if you hadn’t seen data where there was a trend first. So here’s last year’s Daytona 500.

Again, plotting starting spot on the horizontal axis and finishing position on the vertical axis. I got clever this time – the red shading represents finishing positions that were six laps or more down relative to the winner. The red circles represent DNFs, due either to engine problems or crashes. (Just for comparison – at Las Vegas in 2014, only the last nine positions were six or more laps down.

There’s no discernible trend in this plot. Now you see why I showed you the other one first, right?

But maybe it’s one of those anomalous years, right? Let’s look at the data for the last three Daytona 500s.

<sarcasm> Oh, yeah. Much clearer.</sarcasm>.

The trend (or rather, the lack of a trend) holds for the last three Daytona 500s and, in fact, for the July races as well.

Drivers and media types tend to talk about Daytona being a ‘crap shoot’. That’s reflected by the fact that where you finish has very little to do with where you start when you’re talking Daytona.

Why? Well, one big factor is that the close proximity of the racing means that you are much more affected by everyone else on the track. You can be the perfect driver, but it you happen to be behind Donny Dangerous and he spins, you have little chance of avoiding being caught up in it yourself. Remember at 190mph, you’re talking traveling a football field in the blink of an eye.