This NASCAR Season Has Been Historically Unfair
Each week, the author of this post is responsible for an analytical rundown of the weekend's NASCAR Cup Series action. One of the primary metrics cited in those rundowns is a "Fairness Rating," a number designed to correlate how closely the race's results matched overall driver performance, and lately, those ratings have often been jarringly low.
The average Fairness Rating for the entire 2024 Cup Series season is .6411, a number that required a statistical deep dive into how it stacks up against previous years. The results are in, and the author's hypothesis was unsurprisingly confirmed: out of all seasons in which the data has been sufficiently calculated, 2024 is thus far the most unfair.
The above tweet only has enough room to go back to 2019, but this has been calculated as far back as 2005 (when NASCAR's loop data began) and still, no season has ever been as unfair as this one. There are several reasons why this may be the case.
Higher Overtime Frequency
The most obvious factor is the high frequency of overtime finishes in 2024. Through only 25 races, no fewer than 10 of them have required extra laps to complete because of a late caution flag, including the past four in a row. Such finishes are always prone to chaos jumbling up the finishing order, with drivers going for it all and some tough decisions involving whether or not to pit for fresh tires for that final dash.
More Competitive Grid
In recent years, the Cup Series field has gotten more competitive, with the majority of the back end of the field being priced out of the sport. In the late 2010s, teams such as Rick Ware Racing, Premium Motorsports, GoFAS Racing, StarCom Racing, Gaunt Brothers Racing, and many others simply didn't have the resources to keep up, and their finishes would generally reflect that. Other than taking advantage of faster cars falling out of the race, they had little means by which to improve their results.
Now, all of those teams except for Ware are gone, and the 36 Cup Series charters are all owned by well-funded organizations that can at least flirt with a top 10 on a good day. Unfortunately, there is less upward mobility for team owners in today's NASCAR, but it does create a more competitive playing field and therefore a higher degree of variance in results.
The NextGen Car
The biggest factor, however, seems to be the introduction of the NextGen (or Gen-7) car. There's a noticeable dropoff in fairness ratings between 2021 and 2022, which is when the NextGen car was introduced, and with this car, speeds throughout the field have been markedly closer. Track position is more paramount than ever, and there are more cars on the lead lap at the ends of races, meaning if the finish becomes a chaotic one, all bets are off.
Formerly, if a driver whose car just didn't have the speed found their way to the front via strategy, they would have a hard time staying there. Now, it seems that the inverse is much harder, as a driver who has been near the lead all race long will have a difficult time getting back to it if they are to lose that track position. It's harder for the cream to rise to the top, and when combined with the other factors mentioned, the result is the most random Cup Series season in at least 20 years.
Parity is never a bad thing. With that said, it's also something that should be naturally achieved, rather than created by a high degree of luck. In 2024, the parity in the NASCAR Cup Series has largely been a result of luck.
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