Early Rankings: Charlotte I, 2016

Kevin Harvick tops my early Charlotte I driver rankings. (photo courtesy nascar)

Update: I’ve posted my final Charlotte I 2016 driver rankings, which improve upon these early rankings.

Here are my early driver rankings for this week’s NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Charlotte. I compiled them by crunching:

The loop data for the past 15 Sprint Cup races (excluding Daytona and Talladega);
the loop data for the past four races;
the loop data for the past four races at Charlotte;
the loop data for the past eight races at the other tracks in the Large Ovals track group (i.e., Fontana, Kansas, Atlanta, Texas, Chicagoland, Michigan and Kentuck);
the practice and qualifying data for the past four races at Charlotte; and
the practice and qualifying data for past eight races at the aforementioned Large Ovals.

Plus, I tweaked the results obtained with the above with data pulled from the All Star and Showdown races. The results:

NASCARpredict.com