2023 EchoPark 400 at Texas Motor Speedway
Front Runners highlights the drivers that lead laps, run fast laps, and run inside the top 10, 5, & 3 the most at correlated track types.
I feel like we just did this. In part because we did, just two weeks ago at Kanas. Texas is one of the four 1.5-mile tri or quad ovals left on the schedule. As with Kansas, there is no need to get fancy with comparable tracks for Kansas. The tracks I am focused on are the other 1.5-mile tri/quad ovals of Las Vegas, Charlotte, and Kansas.
I’m looking at just two data sets this week. First, the four races so far this year at Las Vegas, Kansas (2), and Charlotte. The other data set is all 10 races at this track type in the Gen 7 car across the 2022 and 2023 seasons.
A couple of interesting trends or notes that I think folks should be aware of:
- Two weeks ago I noted that Ross Chastain had faded some in terms of laps led between 2022 and 2023. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t still been strong at this track type. Across the four races at Las Vegas, Kansas, and Charlotte, he still has over 50% of his laps in the Top 10 and the 9th best average running position.
- Don’t sleep on Ryan Blaney. He has been improving through the season. His Top 10 rate at Las Vegas was 38%. It rosed to 54% at Kansas 1 and 97% at Charlotte, before a slight dip to 76% at Kansas 2.
The charts below are sorted by percentage of laps led by default. There are also a few more columns that you can choose to display but for ease of display those columns are hidden by default. Also included as the final column is the drivers average running position across all laps completed as the tracks in the data set.
