@nascarcasm: Strange-yet-true stats from 2023 NASCAR season
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Most data and statistics serve a purpose. The following do not. They are technically true, but not entirely useful.
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Sean Gardner | Getty Images
Riley Herbst has never lost a race during a partial solar eclipse.
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James Gilbert | Getty Images
Christopher Bell broke the “Bristol Dirt Race Curse.” In 2021 and 2022, Joey Logano and Kyle Busch won the Bristol Dirt Race and then did not win another race the entire rest of the season. Christopher Bell won at Homestead later in the season, shattering this long-standing hex.
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Getty Images
The manufacturer makeup of the Championship 4 was the same for all three series – one Toyota, one Ford and a pair of Chevrolets.
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In the seven races where the No. 23 team ran an Air Jordan scheme, Tyler Reddick had an average finish of 9.0, and had a top-10 finish in five of them.
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Jared C. Tilton | Getty Images
Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s pants did not catch fire in 50% of the Xfinity Series races he ran in 2023.
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Corey LaJoie had a better average finish (19.6) through the first nine races of the playoffs than Regular Season Champion Martin Truex Jr. (19.7).
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2023 marked the third time that Cole Custer has made an Xfinity Series Championship 4 appearance along with a driver with whom he once threw hands. He and Tyler Reddick made the Championship 4 twice (2018 and 2019), followed by he and John Hunter Nemechek in 2023.
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Jared C. Tilton | Getty Images
The Chicago Street Course is such a complex track that no full-time NASCAR driver has ever won it — even to this day.
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Ryan Blaney won the fall race at Martinsville by a margin of only .889 seconds, but that margin is still 74 times larger than the margin with which he won the fall Talladega race, which was .012 seconds.
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Jared C. Tilton | Getty Images
Travis Pastrana’s 11th-place finish in the 2023 Daytona 500 marks the best finish ever in the Great American Race by an individual who once jumped out of a plane without a parachute on purpose.
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Hendrick Motorsports has four full-time drivers in the NASCAR Cup Series. The same number of drivers drove the No. 9 car in 2023.
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2023 was the biggest season yet for the name Ryan. Not only was Ryan Blaney the first driver named Ryan to win the Cup Series championship, but eight total Ryans had starts across all three of NASCAR’s top series.