StatCar Racing: Infineon

June 20, 2008 9:00am CDT

Statistically, last week's race at Michigan was a crap shoot. None of the factors we traditionally consider were predictive enough to determine who would be strong in the LifeLock 400.

Review of Pocono

Since we did not publish a column for last week's race at Michigan, we will review our model's performance in the Pocono 500.

Correlation between pre-race ranking and driver's finish position was 34 percent. The correlation was strongly weighted down by the poor performance of the model's top two ranked drivers: Tony Stewart and Kyle Busch. Both Gibbs teammates experienced problems at Pocono and finished at the rear of the field.

Looking past the Gibbs drivers, much of the rest of the rankings performed as expected. Many of the "value picks" such as Brian Vickers and A.J. Allmendinger recorded top 15 finishes. In addition, the majority of the traditionally strong drivers predicted to run relatively poorly struggled as forecast. Clint Bowyer is the best example of this, as he recorded a dismal finish (39th) that was relatively close to his pre-race ranking (29th), and certainly well below what has been expected of him in the last season and a half.

In terms of year to date fantasy performance, my team in another site's league is currently ranked in the 97th percentile.

This Week's Rankings

A quick aside before diving into this week's rankings: NASCAR needs to find a way to put a road course into the Chase rotation. The winner of the Sprint Cup Championship should, in theory, be the best all around driver on the circuit during the 10-race playoff. So how can a road course, the only way to test a driver's ability to turn left and right, not be included? Not having one is like the NFL saying that special teams will not be played in the NFL Playoffs because offense and defense are the "primary areas" of the game. It's ludicrous.

Plus, the races at Infineon are almost always more exciting then any of the boring "cookie-cutter" races at venues like Lowe's or Texas. Everyone will have more entertaining racing to watch during the season's premier section.

With that rant out of the system, we will move on to this week's rankings. Reviewing last year's race at Infineon reveals three variables that are good predictors of a driver's finish position: speed in practice, driver rating in past races at Infineon, and percent of quality passes in past races at Infineon. Speed in practice is by far the biggest predictor. Since practice has not occurred yet, however, the below rankings are solely based on the driver rating and percent of quality passes.

The regression equation impact coefficients using only the driver rating and percent of quality passes variables are shown below. Check back on Saturday after the final practice session for the updated equation and rankings.

Constant 37
Driver Rating -0.16
Percent of Quality Passes -0.12

The equation for calculating Tony Stewart's expected finish is therefore: Expected Finish = (37)(1) + (-.16)(113.9) + (-.12)(74.2) = 9.9. That expected finish is good enough for Stewart to come out atop this week's pre-practice session rankings.

Post-practice Rankings