2022

More-Experienced Drivers Fared Worse with the Next Gen Car: Season Rankings

From the start of the 2022 season, veteran NASCAR Cup Series drivers fared worse with the Next Gen car much more than their less-experienced counterparts. Some drivers, like Denny Hamlin, seemed to come to grips with the car in the later portions of the season. Others didn’t. […]

Kansas
Age
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
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 […]