What the Daytona 500 really tells us about the season ahead

The long offseason wait is nearly over, and the Daytona 500 has almost arrived. But as great as it will feel to hear the roar of the engines and watch the cars run flat-out in the draft at 200 mph, there’s always the same lingering question underneath the spectacle: How much of what happens in NASCAR’s biggest race actually tells us something real about the season that follows? RELATED: How to watch NASCAR on TV That’s no knock on the race, of course; as the Super Bowl of motorsports, a win there is season-validating in and of itself. This weekend, William Byron is going for an unprecedented third straight Harley J. Earl Trophy, which would be one of the greatest accomplishments in NASCAR history. But we also know Daytona can be a track where chaos reigns, and dominant performances are no guarantee of a trip to Victory Lane. It might be surprising, then, to learn that a driver’s performance in the Daytona 500 does have some actual, predictive effect on the rest of their season. (It was surprising to me, at least!) To look into this, I gathered a sample of every Cup Series driver since 2006 who had at least 15 races the previous year, drove in the Daytona 500, and then appeared at least 14 more times the rest of that season. I then set up a model that predicts what a driver’s rest-of-season performance will be based on their Daytona performance, after controlling for how good (or bad) they were the year before. If we do this for my Adjusted Points+ index stat (which rates drivers based on their finishes relative to a Cup average of 100), we find that a 50 percent improvement in finishing quality at Daytona will lead to a 1.2 percent improvement in finishes over the rest of the season as well. That is, admittedly, a seemingly small effect -- but it’s a significant one as well, meaning it is unlikely to have appeared due to random noise in the data. If a driver finishes better than expected at Daytona, we can say it probably indicates at least some kind of slight improvement that will translate to their overall performance all season long. This is even more apparent when we look instead at Driver Rating, which is more stable because it factors in underlying performance during the race rather than simple finishes. All else being equal, an otherwise average driver (with a previous rating of 70.0) who posted a rating of 100.0 at Daytona — the equivalent of approximately a top-five finish — has tended to improve their rating to 79.2 for the rest of the season, based on data since 2006. When they put up a rating of 110.0 (around what the winner usually has), that number has tended to increase to 80.8.

Again, these changes won’t turn an average driver into a title contender in the grand scheme of the whole season -- it means you’d go from being as good as Josh Berry or Kyle Busch last season to Bubba Wallace. But it’s worth noting that Wallace would have comfortably gotten into The Chase last year if the current format was in place, while Berry and Busch would have missed out. So it’s not a small effect, particularly considering that it originates from just one race at the very beginning of the calendar -- and arguably the most chaotic one, at that. Moreover, the predicted boost from doing well at Daytona is even stronger when we just zoom in on performance at superspeedways over the remainder of the season. Among drivers who had at least three such races the previous year and at least two the rest of the current season, a 50 percent improvement in finishing quality at Daytona will mean, on average, a three percent improvement in finishes at superspeedways over the rest of the season, all else being equal. And our hypothetical Cup-average driver who rattles off a win-worthy 110.0 rating at Daytona to start the year could expect to improve to a rating of 78.0 at superspeedways over the rest of the season, from Atlanta to Talladega. Seeing as how only one driver last season (Joey Logano at 98.1) eclipsed a rating of 86.0 at superspeedways, this means a strong run at Daytona out of the gates could go a surprisingly long way toward telling us who will rank among the series’ very best in the draft all year long. None of this means we should overreact to every tough crash or fortunate break on Sunday (1:30 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). Daytona will always be its own special beast, where luck and survival matter more than almost anywhere else on the schedule. But that doesn’t mean it’s all spectacle, either. Beneath the wrecks and randomness, the “Great American Race” also offers an early signal -- however faint -- about who has actually taken a step forward or backward since last year. And when that’s all the racing we’ll have to go off of, even a small signal can be worth paying attention to.