math
Busch, Kyle
Cautions

Will the Gen-6 Car Affect the Number of Cautions?

I love the Gen-6 car. Not as much as I love the Nationwide cars (but that’s got more to do with what I drive than it does the cars). The big question is whether the decrease in cautions is going to be changed because of the new car.Let’s start (as we usually do) with the new car. […]

Busch, Kyle

Is There Really a Second-Place Curse?

One of the commentators after the final race in Homestead mentioned that Jimmie Johnson should be happy he finished in third because it allows him to avoid the “dreaded second-place curse”.
Anytime someone says something like that, it makes me wonder whether there really is a curse, or whether that person had just been talking to Carl Edwards. So I analyzed a little data and guess what… there really IS a second place curse. […]

Cautions

Cautions: A New Low for NASCAR

At the start of the season, the big news was that cautions were remarkably down from last year. As I showed, this isn’t a new trend – it’s a continuing trend since 2007. Since the season’s data are now complete, I thought it was time to revisit the data. […]

Auto Club Speedway of California
math

How Likely are You to Win the TNT Million Dollar Challenge?

TNT is offering a million dollars to anyone who picks the top ten drivers – in order – at any of the six NASCAR races they broadcast. You have up until 25% of the race has been run to lock in your selections, which means up to mile 100 at Daytona this weekend. How likely are you to win? […]

math

100 Million vs. 78 Million is not the Numbers Question for FOX vs SPEED

The NASCAR pundits have again simplified a complex situation. Incorrectly.

The NASCAR Net is a-twitter since FOX floated a trial balloon about moving races from ESPN to SPEED. I’ve heard the argument over and over, in print and on radio that this is a bad idea because EPSN is in 100 million homes and SPEED is in “only” 78 million homes. They argue this would be a decline of 22 million potential viewers. The question not being asked how many of those 22 million ESPN watchers are actually potential viewers? […]

Engines

The Math of Fuel Mileage

I guess when you have people feeding you all the numbers you need through your earpiece, you think they’re easy to come by. That’s the only explanation I can figure out for the snarky comments by television commentators about crews not being “smart enough” to figure out how much gas to put in the car so that it doesn’t run out before the end of the race. There have been a lot of fuel mileage races the last few weeks. Pocono is traditionally also highly likely to be a fuel mileage race, so let’s clarify how easy (or hard) it is to not run out of fuel. […]