Before Gateway — and the final oval race of this season — I wanted to publish the same stats that have been on our “Statistics” page all season, but limited to ovals only. There have been four oval races this year and Pagenaud has collected the most points (212) from those races. Newgarden has the highest xPoints from those races at 181, just edging out Pagenaud at 175.
Author: Drew
Simulating the IndyCar Season 50,000 Times
One interesting topic I’ve wanted to tackle for some time is forecasting the IndyCar championship. Who is most likely to win the championship at any point in the season? Further, what is the probability of a driver finishing in a specific position in the championship?
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Four Races In, a Stat Check
We’ve hit our first longer break of the IndyCar season, which gives us a good time to take a look at how the season has been playing out so far. Josef Newgarden leads both the actual points standings as well as in xPoints, which isn’t a big surprise given just how dominant he has been driving so far. He has been the most consistent driver all year in terms of the average deviation between his finishing positions, which is just 1.3 positions. The next best driver in terms of consistency, of those who have raced in all four of the first races, is Ed Jones at 3.1 positions. The difference between first and second should tell you a lot about how impressive Newgarden has been driving.
What it Takes to Win at Barber
IndyCar is heading to Barber Motorsports Park this weekend for the third race of the season. This event was red-flagged twice last year, but the year before it ran relatively clean, making it a good candidate to assess what it takes to win down there (or at least to go fast and put yourself in a position to win). Barber is 2.3 miles long and has 17 turns, so not quite as long or as many turns as the last race at COTA, but it is another road course.
Of course what helped drivers go fast there in 2017 might not be exactly what makes them go fast there this year, but it’s likely some of the trends we’ve seen in the past will crop up again this weekend.
A Statistic to Assess IndyCar Race Strategists
In my opinion, there isn’t currently a good way to evaluate team strategy in IndyCar based off of the traditional statistics of starting and finishing position. If a car improves throughout a race, was it because of good strategy, great passes, or just being fast? It’s not particularly easy to tell and even if you watch the race, there’s too many cars and different things going on to get a good measure of what happened by the eye test.
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The Single Seater 