Advanced IndyCar stats and analytics
Today I just wanted to drop a very brief article here on a question I recently looked at. How useful is starting position in terms of predicting finishing position for different tracks? This is a slightly different question than the three I explored in this article on qualifying position, but if you’re interested in qualifying and its relationship to the race I urge you to check out that post as well.
Continue reading “How Predictive is Starting Position at Different Tracks?”
Throughout the 2019 season I kept track of a stat called Expected Points (xPoints). xPoints is the number of points we would expect a driver to earn in a race based on their average track position during the race. The intuition behind xPoints is that crashes, mechanical failures, slow pit-stops, and more “bad luck” don’t reflect a driver’s true skill: these sources of bad luck are factored into traditional stats like average finishing position and the points table overall. A driver’s true skill can be measured by how they ran throughout the entirety of a race, not just by how they finished — or didn’t finish.
So, does measuring xPoints add to our IndyCar knowledge?
Earning the most points throughout the season is the goal of IndyCar racing. Points are how a driver wins championships and every decision a driver and team make throughout the course of a season should be centered around how they can maximize the number of points they’ll earn at the next race. Using the stats I tracked this IndyCar season, we can look at how correlated different stats are with earning points over the course of the season. Correlation is a measure of how strong or weak a relationship is between two variables. It can range from [-1,1], with -1 being a perfect strong negative correlation, 1 being a perfect strong positive correlation, and 0 meaning there is no correlation between the variables. If the correlation between two variables is 1, that means when variable x goes up, so does variable y. If the correlation is -1, that means that when variable x goes up, variable y goes down.
Continue reading “What Stats are Correlated with Winning Championships?”
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.
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?
Continue reading “Simulating the IndyCar Season 50,000 Times”
The Single Seater 