NASCAR Fans Must Separate Results From Performance
One of the ugly truths about NASCAR racing is that it's not always a fair sport.
That was shown on Sunday at Nashville Superspeedway, when no less than five different late caution flags extended the race past its scheduled distance, and with all the crashes as well as many drivers running out of fuel, the finishing order looked as if it may as well have been drawn out of a hat.
One look at the loop data proves just how superfluous these results were. Race winner Joey Logano's average running position throughout the afternoon was 15th. Runner-up Zane Smith's was 29th, as he spent much of the race a lap down on pure pace before the late plot twists allowed him to take advantage of everybody else's misfortunes. Ryan Preece finished fourth with an ARP of 24th, once again by virtue of simply being in the right place at the right time.
Each week, the author of this post designs a series of advanced metrics built from said loop data in order to approximate what the finishing order of every race would be in the fairest possible world -- taking into account factors such as speed, track position, passing, and even estimated equipment strength. Through Excel, it's possible to correlate the results of those metrics with the results of the race, and as expected, Sunday's was horrific.
In most races, this "Fairness Rating" will come out to somewhere in the 0.7 or 0.8 range. On NASCAR's superspeedway tracks, where the cars race in packs and provide more opportunities for randomness, it can dip down to 0.4 or 0.5. At Nashville, an intermediate, it was 0.2564. That means Sunday's finishing order was only barely closer to correlating with the fairest possible result, than with the most unfair possible result.
Again, it's worth noting that finishes such as this one don't happen every race. But this is why statistics such as average finish, top-fives, top-10s, points, and even wins, to a degree, are flawed. When we reach the end of the year and we're evaluating the full-season performance of each driver, nobody will take into account that day in Nashville when the entire running order got turned on its head with two laps to go in the scheduled distance. But we should.
Logano's win doesn't change the fact that he ran a 15th-place race up until the seas parted for him, while drivers like Denny Hamlin, Kyle Larson, and Martin Truex, Jr. all ran top-five races but didn't get the finishes to show for it through no fault of their own. This is what separates auto racing from nearly every other sport: you aren't always in control of your own destiny, and results are often a product of luck just as much as they are a product of skill.
We need less emphasis on results in NASCAR, and more attention drawn towards how they were achieved.
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