Here are my final driver rankings for this weekend’s race at Chicagoland. I compiled them by crunching the practice and qualifying data from Chicagoland Friday and Saturday, and then melding it with the historical data:
Here are my mid-week driver rankings for this week’s NASCAR Sprint Cup race at the big-flat track at Chicagoland. I compiled them by crunching the loop, practice and qualifying data for the 2011 races at Fontana, Michigan, Kansas and Kentucky:
My apologies, race fans, for the delay is posting a race-preview update for Chicagoland, and for the brief update I’m posting now. I’m on vacation out in San Diego and am finding my computer time severely limited.
So, I did manage to crunch Friday’s practice and qualifying data, and I used the results of that analysis to come up with updated rankings for tonight’s race:
Johnson’s wife delivered their baby, so the champ should be ready to roll tonight. Continue reading
The Red Bull cars started on the front row at Chicagoland last year. (Photo Todd Warshaw/Getty Images)
This week the series heads to Joliet, Ill., for a run on Chicagoland Speedway. Chicagoland is a 1.5-mile, d-shaped track with 18 degrees of banking in the turns. These stats place it squarely in the big-flat track category, along with the tracks at Michigan, California, Kansas, Pocono and Indianapolis. This means we have plenty of historical data at our disposal this week, and that alone improves this race’s predictability quite a bit.
In addition, Weather.com says the Joliet area should receive clear, sunny skies Friday and Saturday, further bolstering predictability.
Finally, Chicagoland is not as big as Michigan, Pocono, etc., so it typically sees fewer races decided by fuel mileage than the giant flat tracks. At the same time, it remains big enough to produce fewer of the on-track accidents and pit-road incident that rear their head at many of the smaller tracks on the circuit. Continue reading
