RotoAcademy Preview: Useful NASCAR Statistics
They’re your saviors. Fangraphs. Pro Football Reference. Basketball Reference. The PGA Tour’s website. These are the building blocks of advanced society on which you lean to feed your degenerate heart, and the maintainers of them are saints in the eyes of many. We have such a sweet prince in the world of NASCAR, as well.
If Racing Reference were to run ads on their pages, my page views would have given them enough revenue to surpass the GDP of Uruguay. It’s almost a one-stop-shop for all of your NASCAR research.
Here, I’m going to go through several different ways you can use the site to your advantage. However, I’m not going to be able to hit all of them. The site is crazy expansive and has more info than I can ever consume, much less explain. I’d recommend taking some time after reading this just to cruise through its canals and finding the little nuggets to lead you to fantasy goodness.
Editor’s Note: This is one of the many valuable DFS lessons that can be found over at RotoAcademy. Click here to browse through all of our free/premium offerings and improve as a daily fantasy sports player!
Loop Data
First, I want to give a general overview of stats that NASCAR uses and which ones are most pertinent to our purposes so that I don’t have to explain them when referencing later. Then we’ll dive into where you can find these stats and implement them correctly in the next lesson.
The broad term for almost all NASCAR statistics is “loop data.” Basically, around every track, there are these little scoring lines that help track a driver’s running position, the number of passes they make, their lap times, and other dope things. With this, we get a complete sample of how a driver actually performs, whereas their finishing position is how they were running on a sample size of one lap.
There are a few different ways you can find this data on Racing Reference. I’ll go through those in the sections here about researching drivers, tracks and recent races. Next, though, I want to cover the stats you’ll be looking at so that the terms I use there aren’t completely gobbledygook.
Useful NASCAR Statistics
Whaaaaaaaat? Statistics in NASCAR? Surely, this is some sort of major oversight.
Bruh or bruhette, stats are the dopest in NASCAR. Sure, they have the same limitations as stats in other sports, but they provide you such a complete picture of how well a driver is doing. If you know how to use them well that is.
Let’s run through some of the stats that I use on a weekly basis to help me pick which drivers are going to make my heart hum the most.
The first stat that I look at each and every week is average running position. As I mentioned above, a driver’s finishing position only tells you where he was on one particular lap. This metric gives you a broader picture, showing if the person was running well or if they were struggling. For context, when I am looking for top-end studs, I want them to have average running positions lower than 10th. This way, I know that these dudes were in contention the entire race, even if their finishing position doesn’t reflect that. For mid-tier drivers, I’ll want them to be in the lower teens, and for a punt driver, anything in the top 25 is superb.
Obviously, there are limitations to this. Let’s say a driver starts a race 43rd. He spends the entire race working his way through the pack and ends up finishing fifth. That’s a really great day. However, his average running position will probably be a bit lower. When you are doing broad research over an entire field, it’s fine to rely on average running position, but you’ll also want the context of why their position was where it was.
The next stat I will look at is driver rating. If you want the full rundown of how to compute this, Fantasy Racing Cheat Sheet has the details. I, personally, have no idea how to compute it. However, I do know the elements and these are useful for our purposes.
Basically, driver rating cooks all of the metrics into one big pot and spits out a number analogous to a quarterback rating. It factors in average running position, finishing position, average speed, fastest laps, laps led, and a couple of other elements. It can give you a great look into how good a driver’s overall day was.
Like quarterback rating, driver rating has its flaws. It is heavily influenced by finishing position, and like I mentioned above, that’s not really a great statistic on which to dwell. That’s why it’s something I look at after I’ve already covered average running position.
Next, I’m looking at the money makers for daily fantasy in fastest laps and laps led. While these are included in the driver rating, I also like to look at them independently so that I can make sure I’m not missing anything with the other statistics.
If I see a driver who has a mediocre average running position, but who was able to lead some laps, that’s going to cause me to do some additional research. Did that driver run into bad luck? They may have led laps early, but then run into issues, which would cause their average running position to sag. This could point out some deception within the average running position that we’ll want to know about before formulating a full opinion.
Fastest laps can tell me – occasionally – whether or not a driver had bad luck, as well. If his average running position was 13th, but he had a bunch of fastest laps, it may mean that he started at the back and was forced to work his way through the pack all day. In all likelihood, that won’t be the case as he will be navigating through more traffic, slowing his speeds down. However, it’s a possibility, so I will at least give it a look to see if there are any peculiarities.
With both fastest laps and laps led, I will only use them to increase my valuation of the driver. I will not dock a driver if he doesn’t have a high number of laps led or fastest laps. The reason for that being that, if a driver has an average running position in the top five, odds are he will end up at the front of the pack at some point. If he doesn’t, that’s probably more a product of randomness than anything. If they were to duplicate that success the next time out, they will more likely than not be able to rack up some points for you in those categories.
Finally, I will generally at least glance at a driver’s place and pass differential, though only in passing. Pass differential has a high degree of randomness (which is why DraftKings eventually removed it as a scoring category after it had originally been included in the formula). It can show, though, if a person was bobbing and weaving through other cars with regularity, which is encouraging.
With place differential, that’s my trying to make sure the average running position I’m using is accurate again. If they have a huge place differential, I’m likely going to give them a pass if their average running position isn’t what I was looking for as it will likely show they started in the back, skewing their average running position in the wrong way.
In Daily Fantasy NASCAR: An Introduction to Research and Strategies, you’ll learn:
• The basic scoring rules of daily fantasy NASCAR, and how they should influence your strategy
• Where to find useful NASCAR statistics and how to properly implement them
• What you should look for when selecting your drivers each weekend
• How track type should influence your strategy
• The importance of starting position as it relates to value in daily fantasy NASCAR
To read the rest of “Daily Fantasy NASCAR: An Introduction to Research and Strategies”, you must purchase the course!
