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. […]

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. […]