Why Dover is NASCAR’s greatest test of driver skill — with a catch

After a stretch of races at a drafting track (won by Chase Elliott) and back-to-back road/street courses (both won by Shane van Gisbergen), the Cup Series gets back to its oval-racing roots this weekend. Well, sort of. On Sunday, drivers will try to tame Dover’s “Monster Mile” -- which at least does have four left turns. But that might be one of the few things it has in common with the rest of the schedule. Dover is one of only a handful of tracks paved with concrete, which already sets it apart from the norm. It’s also marked by its high-banked corners, and the constant g-forces drivers face as they ride the fence on the straights and dive to the apron on turns. Add in the 400-mile distance -- easily the longest race at any track shorter than 1.3 miles -- and you’ve got one of the most challenging events on the Cup calendar. The thing about a challenge, however, is that it brings out the best the sport has to offer -- and that has certainly been the case for Dover over the years. In fact, you could argue Dover is the highest-skill track in Cup, based on both who wins there and how well the pre-race favorites tend to hold up on the track (with one big caveat). Let’s start with the winners, which in recent years have included future Hall of Famers Denny Hamlin, Martin Truex Jr. and Chase Elliott. According to the pre-race projected Driver Ratings, the average recipient of Miles the Monster has ranked No. 4.6 in the field entering the race. That’s the second-best placement for winners at any track with at least five races since 2005 -- COTA’s average is 4.0 in exactly five races, but it’s generally easier for favorites to win road courses (just ask SVG) -- and Dover is the best of any track with double-digit races in that span:

In other words, you can be pretty sure Dover’s winning driver was regarded highly beforehand, one mark of a track that rewards a high degree of skill. Contrast that with the superspeedways at Daytona and Talladega on the opposite end of the list, where chaos reigns supreme. That’s not the only way we can tell Dover is a place where the best and brightest drivers tend to shine, of course. We can also flip things around and see how the favorites tend to fare at any given site, under the theory that a great track lets the best drivers live up to expectations. And by that measure, Dover once again looks like a true test of skill. It again ranks second only to a much smaller-sample track -- Nashville, another concrete intermediate -- in terms of the average Driver Rating produced by the top-ranked entry in the pre-race rankings (114.0), easily higher than next-ranked New Hampshire (112.3).

Want to know just how reliable Dover is for favorites in terms of running an extremely strong race? In their past 22 races at the track, dating back to the 2012 season, the No. 1 ranked driver in the pre-race rankings has posted a Driver Rating in the triple digits 17 times -- including a stretch of nine in a row at one point -- and they’ve been at or above a rating of 97.6 in all but two races during that span. The upshot of all this is that Dover tends to produce excellent winners and also rewards the best drivers with strong runs. So what’s the catch, then? Well, just because a driver has a great Driver Rating does not mean he’ll win the race. (We’ll spare you the gory details of the Driver Rating formula, but it rewards mid-race speed as much as high finishes.) And again, as we saw in our previous research on the superspeedways, tracks with a tendency toward chaotic crashes will also trend toward dragging great cars down in the final finishing order, no matter how good they looked earlier in the race. Indeed, this is exactly what we see when we compare Dover to other tracks according to the pre-race favorite’s average finish. Despite their stronger form during the race at the Monster Mile, favorites tend to finish worse at Dover (9.1 on average) than at Loudon (7.7), Darlington (7.9), Richmond (8.7) or, when we still ran there, Fontana (9.0).

The big reason why? While those other tracks boast an average rate of 97.1% to finish the race for the favorite, the pre-race No. 1 at Dover only finishes 91.7% of the time on average -- below the norm for favorites at ovals in the Cup Series overall. We said before that Dover is one of the most demanding tracks on the Cup calendar, and that applies in a bunch of different ways. The constant up-and-down roller-coaster of each lap puts a lot of strain on the equipment, which opens up the chance for parts to fail and end your day. It’s a narrow track and a hard one to pass on; lapped traffic is always a factor for the leaders to deal with up front. And it runs a comparatively high speed for its length -- much faster than other tracks around a mile long, such as Loudon, Phoenix and Iowa -- which gives drivers less time to react when an accident happens ahead of them. You can usually count on at least one big wreck that collects multiple cars in the process. With so many different ways to ruin an otherwise great run, the Monster Mile lives up to its fearsome reputation. The drivers know it will be far from a smooth Sunday cruise for them out on the bumpy Delaware concrete. But they also know how much effort and commitment it takes to win there -- and the sense of accomplishment that comes if you can actually survive the perils of Dover and ride to Victory Lane.