Better competition remains to be seen from 'new' car

It's interesting how you can sit in front of your television set, whether it's in your family room, or in a race venue's Media Center, and just ignorantly be fat, dumb and happy thinking that this year's competition is better than last year's.

If not better, it just has to be just as good, right?

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I know I did.

But after a truly blessed Easter break, I thought I'd chart up a few stats to see just how things measured up -- from the first five races of 2007 compared to the first five of '08.

This may not be a surprise to a lot of you, but overall it's not looking too good for NASCAR's new car being a panacea of competitive bliss. In fact, there's very little to draw a distinction between the new car and its predecessor.

In stat categories that are easily quantifiable, the two seasons stacked up with 21 check marks apiece, favoring one over the other.

It appears the new car is better at Daytona, but in most cases a loser at the intermediate, high-downforce ovals. On Bristol's short track, comparing the spring races is nearly a dead heat -- but you have to take into account that Bristol reconfigured its track for the August 2007 race.

And the interesting thing is that while last August's race was pretty fairly panned by the critics, statistically speaking it fared better than the race of two weeks ago, won in a green-white-checker finish by Jeff Burton.

Just so we're on the same page, here's what I charted up as an estimation of relative competition.

First, I took total Lead Changes and how many drivers these changes were among and then added Green Flag Passes. I also computed the percentage of total passes that were made under the green flag.

For the 2007 Daytona 500, Kevin Harvick's last-lap pass of Mark Martin aside, the 2008 version soundly trounced last year's race from a statistical standpoint; 42 lead changes among 16 drivers compared to 13 among nine in 2007.

There were 36 green-flag changes in 2008, or an 86 percent ratio, to eight green-flag changes in '07, or only 62 percent. A telling point was that in each race, the pass for the lead was made on the final lap which, as we all know makes more than a few people forget a snoozer of a race.

For some reason, California favored the new car, with 33 lead changes among 15 drivers, and 17 of those under green-flag conditions, or 52 percent. A year ago, the speedway featured 28 lead changes among 12 drivers, but 19 were under green, or 68 percent. Again, is that almost a wash?

The higher speed intermediates, Las Vegas and Atlanta, really favored the standard car in their lead change stats. Las Vegas had 28 lead changes among 16 drivers in 2007 and only 19 among nine this season. Atlanta had 31 changes among 13 men in 2007 and, in the face of Kyle Busch's dominant performance earlier this month, 26 among only nine men. (Continued)