I ended up with so much more interesting information on the Daytona 500 that I might need to put out a second Graph of the Day today!

But this one is near and dear to me because so many people strive to get the Daytona 500 pole despite the pole giving no advantage in the race itself. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a disadvantage, but putting a lot of energy into anything except winning the race seems a waste to me.

Unless you just really like winning the pole.

The color key is that

- Red indicates polesitters who won

- Yellow indicates polesitters who didn’t win, but placed between second and fifth

- Green indicates a P6-P10 finish

- Blue is a P11-P20

- Grey is anything beyond 21st place

The crosshatched bars represent polesitter DNFs

The obvious feature

Graph of the Day for 02–18–2023: Daytona 500 Polesitters’ Fates was originally published in Building Speed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

About the Graph

Kyle Busch’s second qualifying run was disallowed because he went below the double yellow line.

Chandler Smith, the first driver to qualify, had problems with his car staying fired. You can just barely see the data point in the upper right hand corner.

Conor Daly couldn’t post a pole time because an electric problem opened up an oil line. He’ll have to race in tonight.

Jimmie Johnson and Travis Pastrana both secured spots in the Daytona 500 with their qualifying times

Also…

Alex Bowman’s record of starting on the front row of the Daytona 500 increased to six out of the last eight races, or 75%.

The next-closest driver in terms of percentages of starting on the front row is William Byron at 40%. Bowman is almost double the next-best driver’s rate.

But, as I point out in my

Graph of the Day for 02–16–2023: Daytona 500 Qualifying was originally published in Building Speed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Some veteran drivers, like Denny Hamlin, seemed to come to grips with the car in the later portions of the season.

Others didn’t.

One measure of the struggle to adapt is the change in a driver’s season-ending rank.

Changes in Season Ranking: 2021–2022

My first graph shows the changes in season ranking for all drivers who ran full seasons in 2021 and 2022. I discuss this graph’s in my NBC Sports column, but I wanted to expand on some of the details here.

The drivers with the biggest losses (on the left) are veteran drivers, while those with the largest gains (on the right) are less-experienced drivers.

A better way to view this data (although it obsc

More-Experienced Drivers Fared Worse with the Next Gen Car: Season Rankings was originally published in Building Speed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A note: When I talk about championship contenders below, I’m talking about the top-8 ranked drivers.

Laps Finished

How’s that old saw go? To finish first, you must first finish. So let’s examine how drivers did this year in terms of completing laps. I show only drivers who ran all 36 races in the graph below.

2021 offered 9200 laps worth of racing.

- 27 drivers completed 90% or more of those laps.

- 19 drivers completed 95% or more of those laps

Looking at individual drivers:

- Denny Hamlin completed all but four laps, giving him a 99.96% lap completion rate. — Last year, he was second with 99.8% laps run.

- Kevin Harvick was next, with 9150 laps (99.46%). — He was first last year, with 99.97%.

- Cheers to Tyler Reddick, who came in third with 9141 laps.

- Cheers also to

2021 Laps: Finished, Led and Fastest was originally published in Building Speed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

NASCAR introduced stages in 2017 with an eye to making the middles of races a little more exciting. By most metrics, it’s worked. They’ve done a good job of making stage wins an important part of the march to the Championship.

A note: I consider here only stage points, not race-end points. I also exclude the stage points won from the Duels.

Stage Winners

Let’s start our review of 2021 stage wins and points by looking at stage-winning drivers. We ran 73 stages in 2021: two in every race and a third for the Coca Cola 600.

- Fourteen different drivers won stages in 2021. That’s down from 20 drivers last year.

- Kyle Larson dominated with 18 stage wins

- Denny Hamlin came in a distant second with 10 stage wins

- Kyle Busch had 7 wins

2021: Stage Wins and Points was originally published in Building Speed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2021 DNFs by Driver

Let’s start by looking at drivers who ran (or intended to run) a full season.

- Quin Houff had the most DNFs at 10.

- Anthony Alfredo came in second with 9 DNFs

- Ryan Preece was a close third with 8.

- The numbers drop a bit after that. — LaJoie and Stenhouse, Jr. tied with 6

- Logano, Byron, Newman,Bowman and Almirola all had 5 DNFs

On the positive side

- Denny Hamlin was the only driver with no DNFs in 2021.

- Harvick, Larson, Truex Jr., Redick, DiBenedetto and Bilicki tied for second with 2 DNFs each out of 36 races.

- Honorable mention for Garrett Smithley. He’s not on this chart because he only ran 27 races, but he only had one DNF in those 27 races.

Of top drivers:

- There’s a clear correlation between rank and DNFs: Not finishing a race is obviously going to impair your points total; however, finishing doesn’t guarantee a higher rank.

- Joey Logano had the most DNFs of the top-8 season finishers with 5

- Champion Larson had only 2 DNFs

All Drivers

Expanding the scope, let’s look at all 2021 DNFs. Because

2021 DNFs: NASCAR by the Numbers was originally published in Building Speed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 2021, NASCAR inspected 1383 cars and drivers. 125 cars/drivers started at the back of the grid. That’s about 9% TTB for the season.

Why Cars Go to the Back

The main reasons sending drivers to the back are inspection failures (46) and unapproved adjustments (44), as shown in the pie chart below. Those two reasons comprise 72% of the cars that had to go to the back.

Only 12.8% of the cars (16) going to the back did it with a backup car. That number is way down from ‘normal’ years due to the lack of practice and qualifying.

Where are Cars Going to the Back?

The largest number of cars went to the back at superspeedways and road courses — plus Pocono and Texas.

Who’s Going to the Back?

In the graph below, I’ve shown to the back stats for all drivers, with the top 12 drivers highlighted. Only 10 bars are highlighted because Logano and Harvick never incurred a penalty. Neither did Ricky Stenhouse. Those are the only three full-time drivers who didn’t get sent to the back at least once

2021 To The Back: NASCAR by the Numbers was originally published in Building Speed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2021 Accidents Relative to Recent History

Remember that NASCAR only tabulates accidents that cause cautions. If there’s an accident at the end of a race, it is not captured in their statistics. There’s also a bit of a judgement call in ranking something as a spin or an accident.

Accordingly, we had 117 Accidents (and 20 spins) this year. That’s lower than the last two years and about the same as 2018. It’s still eight more than the minimum number of accidents and spins we had in 2012.

2021 Accidents by Driver

Every driver who ran the full 36-race season had at least one accident. I’ve highlighted the top-12 ranked drivers in the graph below, so you can see that even the best drivers were not immune from getting hit

In 2019, Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. racked up a total of 19 accidents to take 1st place in a category no one wants to win. He fell to 6th place in 2020 with only 11 accidents.

I’m sorry to say that Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. is back on top this year with 17 accidents in the 2021 season.

2021 Accidents: NASCAR by the Numbers was originally published in Building Speed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Penalties in Recent History

NASCAR handed out 317 in-race penalties in 2021. That’s a little down from last year’s 337 penalties, but continues the downward trend from 2018, when we had 393 penalties.

As I’ve done in the past, I’ve split the 2021 penalties into driver mistakes and crew mistakes. This year, I had four penalties that had to do with drivers being called to pit road to repair their cars. That didn’t really seem like anyone’s fault, so I put them into an ‘other’ category.

Driver penalties are the typical driver errors: speeding on pit road, missing the commitment line,etc. Crew penalties are too many crew over the wall, or over the wall too soon.

Drivers are pretty predictable when it comes to penalties: You can count on about 200 driver-incurred in-race penalties each year. The reason for the overall decrease is that crew penalties are down by almost by a factor of 2 since 2018, from 199 to 109.

2021 Penalties was originally published in Building Speed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Parts II and III will take a deep dive into some stats. But first, let’s look at the overall season

The Races

NASCAR shook up the schedule like never before, adding road courses to bring us to a total of six, plus Nashville. But that came at the cost of losing Kentucky and Chicago.

Where We Raced

We raced 26 different tracks this year, which is up from 22 in 2020.

19: The number of states we raced in this year. That’s one more than in 2020.

In terms of most visited states:

- 4: Florida and Virginia (Virginia only had three races last year because we only visited Richmond once.)

- 3: Tennessee — thanks to adding Nashville

When We Raced

2020 was a bumper year for racing on different days of the week, but we were pretty much back to normal in 2021.

80% of the races happened on Sunday.

14%: The percentage of races run on Saturday

Here are the ac

2021 NASCAR Season Overview: NASCAR by the Numbers was originally published in Building Speed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.