DIRTRACKR Daily Podcast - Episode Transcript
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Chris Windom going NASCAR Cup racing, a look at dirt racing value finishes | DIRTRACKR Daily 2/24/21
It is Wednesday, February 24th, two thousand and twenty one and you are tuned into DIRTRACKR Daily. I'm Justin Fiedler.
Today we've got details on Chris Windom getting a Cup ride, there is a new Silver Crown Series book coming, and then we dive into even more new stats on the site surrounding value finishes. Let's jump in.
It was announced yesterday that Chris Windom will get a unique NASCAR opportunity next month. When the Cup Series heads to Bristol on March 28th for the Bristol dirt race, Windom will be in the field, piloting the number 15 for Rick Ware Racing with backing from NOS Energy Drink. Windom was the 2020 USAC National Midget champion, and the Bristol race will be his Cup Series debut. It won't be his first time in a full bodied stock car though, as Windom has past starts with ARCA and the NASCAR truck series. Two of Windom's truck series starts came on the dirt at Eldora in 2017 and 2018. He has finishes of 19th and 14th, running for Mike Mittler and David Gilliland respectively. Windom's success in open wheel dirt racing, along with his varied experience in other forms of racing will make him an intriguing driver to watch. The dirt will no doubt level the playing field for the Cup Series competitors, and Windom could have an opportunity for a very strong finish. The dirt events at Bristol start on March 15th with the opening of the Bristol Dirt Nationals, followed the next week by the three NASCAR events, and then the World of Outlaws wrap up the stretch in April with their two weekends.
When I had USAC's Richie Murray on DIRTRACKR Conversations back a few weeks ago, he mentioned working on a new Silver Crown Series book, and it was announced yesterday that the book is available now for pre-order. Richie, Bob Mays, Patrick Sullivan, and John Mahoney all contributed to the book which covers 50 years of Silver Crown Series history, from 1971 through the 2020 season. It's called Rolling Thunder and it covers everything from the days of AJ Foyt and Mario Andretti, through the more recent dominance of Kody Swanson. The book is $49.95 and can be pre-ordered at sprintcarhof.com. For more information, visit usacracing.com.
Yesterday on the show we talked about new stats available in the analytics section of dirtrackr.com, and I finished rolling those out fully yesterday, with the addition of hard chargers to individual driver pages, along with adding the efficiency numbers to the individual year stat breakdown pages and driver pages. I tweeted a few of the efficiency numbers out for Donny Schatz and Brandon Sheppard last night during some of their dominant seasons, but I've only really just begun to dig through those and understand what we are seeing. As I said yesterday, we'll talk more about those in the future, especially as the seasons progress. I think, combined with a few other stats, these will really help us understand who is doing well through a season, and who we should be paying attention to for championship runs. It feels like we'll see some common threads in those efficiency categories for top runners.
Another aspect of these analytics I'm super interested in is value finishes. Who can take a crappy starting position and make it as good as possible. Things we already have like hard chargers and feature plus/minus can give us some clues about who's good at doing that, but this can only take us so far. If you start 24th and finish 16th, you might earn hard charger and you're credited with +8 in feature plus/minus, but finishing 16th doesn't help when you're racing Brad Sweet, or Jimmy Owens, or Brady Bacon for a championship. So as of this morning, I've created and added two more stat categories to all the series in the dirtrackr.com analytics section. We can now look at what I'm calling top five and top ten value finishes for the series and individual seasons. These are basically how many top fives and top tens drivers get when they start outside the top ten in a feature. So for example, Tim McCreadie led the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series in top five value finishes in 2020, bagging six. And Carson Macedo led the way with the World of Outlaws Sprint Car Series in 2020, bagging 20 top ten finishes when he started outside the top ten. To help complete the picture though, we also need to know how many times those drivers start outside the top ten. Because if someone starts outside the top ten in all 70 races in a season, but gets 10 top five finishes, that will look better than someone who only starts outside the top ten ten times and gets five top five finishes. So when you look at those stat categories, I've also got outside top ten starts and the percentage of the time they are able to get top five or top ten finishes.
So back to Carson Macedo and his 20 top ten value finishes, he had 27 outside top ten starts, so 74% of the time, Macedo was able to turn those starts into top ten finishes, and 18.5% of the time, he turned them into top five finishes. This tells us two things about Carson Macedo. One, he needs to find ways to start higher, because 27 outside top ten starts is a lot. But on the flip side, he is able to maximize on those finishes quite often. Combined with his feature plus minus of +123, we know Carson Macedo does a lot of passing and improving his situation once the green flag drops.
Another driver that did well last season in these categories is Tanner Thorson in USAC Midget competition. Thorson converted all seven of his outside top ten starts into top ten finishes, and five of seven into top five finishes. Of drivers with a significant amount of starts with the series in 2020, not many had fewer outside top ten starts than Thorson, but nobody converted like Thorson did. As a comparison, Buddy Kofoid only had five outside top ten starting spots, and converted two into top tens, but none into top fives. Not surprisingly, Thorson led the series in feature plus/minus as well. Again, like Macedo, when Thorson was stuck starting deeper in fields, he found a way to get good finishes. As 2021 rolls along, you'll probably hear me start referencing these numbers as we talk about races and how the season is progressing for different drivers. Looking at some of his numbers like we just talked about, plus knowing who he's working with now and some things he did during the offseason make me super high on a guy like Macedo. This is year three for him with the Outlaws and I think a lot of signs are pointing to a very strong season ahead for him and the JJR team. The whole reason I created the analytics section of the website was so we could start finding ways to better understand how the racing plays out over the course of a night and of a season. To see all these numbers we talked about, visit dirtrackr.com/analytics.
If you'd like some more dirt racing audio this week, there are plenty of new podcast episodes. Winged Nation has Doug Johnson from Jackson Motorplex, Open Red has Chris Dolack, the Loudpedal guys are talking to Kody Swanson and Doug Clark, Forward Bite has Clint Smith, Quicktime has Shane Golobic, Passing Points has Bryan Hulbert, Suavetalk at Dirt on Dirt has Kyle Larson, and there are new episodes of the Dirt Nerds, Wednesdays with Wayne, and the Midwest Autosports Podcast. To see the full list of shows and episodes, visit dirtrackr.com/podcasts.
There are two items on the daily streaming schedule today. Besides FloRacing 24/7, MAVTV Plus has the Southeast Dirt Modified Series and more from North Carolina Speedweek at Fayetteville Motor Speedway. To see the fully daily schedule, with links to watch, visit dirtrackr.com/watchtonight.
That's it for the show today, hope everyone has a good Wednesday.
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