Daytona has earned its reputation as a place where anything can happen

Neil Paine

2 years ago

Sean Gardner | Getty Images

As the fight for the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs reaches its frenzied conclusion, two races remain for at least five drivers to fight over no more than four postseason spots. So if you haven’t locked in your playoff status yet, things are starting to feel mighty precarious right now. That is especially the case considering the first of those two races, Saturday night’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 (7:30 p.m. ET, NBC, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCA Radio, NBC Sports App), comes at Daytona International Speedway. Daytona is a fascinating subject because it's the sport’s flagship track -- home of the most famous race in America, the Daytona 500 -- but it also carries a reputation for being one of the most chaotic. That duality was represented in the career of the late, great Dale Earnhardt, who hated the type of pack racing that emerged at Daytona in the restrictor-plate era, even as he became the greatest plate-racer in history. (So remarkable was Earnhardt’s ability to manipulate the draft that legend held he could “see the air” as he maneuvered through the field.) Pack racing means one mistake or miscommunication, by any of dozens of different cars, can create the “Big One” at any moment. So, it’s natural that drivers would be anxious to cast their fate to the Daytona winds with the playoffs on the line. And the numbers support that feeling. RELATED: Racing Insights predicts the Daytona winner There are a few ways to measure just how random Daytona races can be. Back when William Byron won the 500 in February, I wrote about how surprisingly rare it was for the best driver in the Cup Series to win the Super Bowl of Stock Car Racing -- with Daytona winners performing worse on average in the previous season (according to my Adjusted Points+ index metric) than the winners at any other track since the early 1970s. But let’s expand on that further by retroactively calculating my rolling driver rankings going into each race, tracking how well the top driver did -- as well as where the eventual winner was ranked going into the race. In the average Cup Series race (at all tracks) since 1975, the No. 1 driver in the pre-race rankings wins 15.7% of the time, with an average finish of 10.8; meanwhile, the eventual winner of any given race had an average ranking of 6.6 going in. And those numbers get more predictable at short tracks, for instance, where the No. 1 driver wins 21.1% of the time with an average finish of 9.1, while the average winner had a pre-race ranking of 5.5. However, we see how much more chaotic things can be at restrictor-plate tracks like Daytona and Talladega. Across all plate tracks, the No. 1 driver wins just 8.9% of races with an average finish of 15.8, while the average winner went into the race with a ranking of 9.0. And Daytona is even more unpredictable. While the No. 1 driver has historically won 9.1% of the time -- about on par with Talladega -- they’ve also posted an average finish of 15.9, with the winner going into the race with an average rank of 9.8. Both of those latter figures are the highest for any track on the current Cup Series schedule with at least 10 races run since 1975.

And the midseason Daytona race, which has been run at night under the lights since 1998, is the most helter-skelter of all. It sees the No. 1 ranked driver win just 8.2% of the time with an average finish of 17.1, and the average winner has gone in with a ranking of 9.8. For every time this race was won by the top driver, as happened with Earnhardt (in 1990 and 1993), Jeff Gordon (1998) and Jimmie Johnson (2013), it was just as often won by comparatively less-heralded drivers like Greg Sacks (No. 28 in 1985), John Andretti (No. 31 in 1997), Greg Biffle (No. 29 in 2003), David Ragan (No. 25 in 2011) and Justin Haley (No. 32 in 2019). And all of this is from the perspective of the top driver before the race. How about the best driver in the race itself? You might think the best driver and the race winner are one and the same -- and for sure, there’s a certain school of thought that “if you ain't first, you're last.” But since we’re on the topic of randomness, it’s worth looking at how often the statistical best driver of the race, as measured by Driver Rating, actually wins at Daytona (and other tracks), and how often their day is spoiled by unforeseen circumstances. RELATED: How to get notified for 2025 schedule release Since 2005, the earliest season of loop data at Racing-Reference.info, the driver with the highest rating in the race wins at a surprisingly low clip of 56.2% overall, which underscores just how much stands between the car with the best pure speed and Victory Lane each week, regardless of the track. But that number falls to 43.6% at Daytona -- the third-lowest success rate at any current track with at least 10 races in that span, trailing only Talladega (41.0%) and Indianapolis (41.2%). Moreover, the driver with the best driver rating in Daytona races has an average finish of just 5.8, which is far worse than the overall Cup Series average of 3.0 since 2005, and easily the worst of any active qualified track:

This, perhaps more than anything else, speaks to the chaos sitting at the heart of Daytona. Because the Big One’s potential lurks around every turn, drivers can do everything right and still get sent to the back of the field by the end of the race, if they get caught up in a massive wreck. The top stars in the sport are far from immune to this -- remember how mediocre the No. 1 ranked pre-race driver tends to do here -- which in turn opens up chances for cars deeper in the field to rise to the front. If you are one of the drivers on the cusp of the playoffs, you could look at this as something to fear: Everything you prepared for all season could be cruelly swept away at any moment. But it also represents an opportunity. Since a win can officially stamp your ticket to the postseason -- and any high finish can help solidify your points position -- Daytona could also be what makes a driver’s playoff hopes instead of breaking them. After all, somebody has to win, no matter how much chaos it takes to get there in the end.