Age
Young Drivers Take Over NASCAR: The Outtakes
A few graphs I made for my NBC Sports article on young drivers and then opted not to use. Age Distribution of the Field 1980-present This is one of those graphs I found really useful […]
nascar
Air Titan
The Scientific Secrets of PJ1 Track Bite
NASCAR’s continued struggle to balance cost, safety and competitiveness led to using PJ1 Track Bite in 2017 at Bristol Motor Speedway. Since then it’s been used (mostly successfully) at other tracks. So what is it […]
Graph of the Day
Where Do Daytona Duel Winners Start?
Where a driver starts at a superspeedway race and where he or she finishes often have little correlation. It’s a different story for the Daytona Duels. Superspeedway courses are notorious for defying correlation. The likelihood […]
Graph of the Day
Does a Duel Win Mean an Advantage in the Daytona 500?
Winning one of the Duels tomorrow night puts you up front for the Daytona 500. But does a win in the Duels make you any more likely to win the Daytona 500? Tomorrow night marks […]
Drivers
GOTD: NASCAR Driver First Names
NASCAR drivers have some unique names, but I hadn’t appreciated the full range of names until now. I’m teaching myself Python. Excel has its limitations, especially in pulling together data from long periods of time […]
Cautions
Cautions and Yellow-Flag Lead Changes
Lead changes are frequently used as a way to measure how ‘good’ the racing is. But yellow-flag lead changes aren’t all that exciting. Even worse, they skew the statistics because a race with a lot […]
Drivers
NASCAR Numbers 2019: Part 2 — The Drivers
Sixty-four drivers in 46 different car numbers ran for 37 full-schedule and 10 limited-schedule teams in 2019. But how did they do? And how does that compare to 2018? In my last post, I examined […]
Racing
NASCAR Numbers 2019: Part 1
With another season in the record books and everyone making their top ten lists, it’s time to look at what the numbers say about the year that was… Season Overview The requisite 36 points-paying races […]
Cautions
Do Cautions Breed Cautions?
There are a lot of NASCAR sayings. You know them: one announcer starts and the others all join in. Last weekend at Martinsville, with three cautions in the last 50 laps, it was “cautions breed […]
Graphs and Charts
Dominance of the Few Isn’t New in NASCAR
Have recent rules and regulation changes made the NASCAR Cup series less competitive by making a small number of drivers dominant and locking out others? […]