How the Races Were Won from 2001 to 2005

by Sean Wrona

I changed my mind on one previous judgment between writing the 1996-2000 column and this one. I have decided to change Tony Stewart's win in the 2000 Winston Cup spring Dover race to natural. While Dale Earnhardt didn't exactly contest the pass, Stewart did pass him on track and there were many other passes I counted as natural that weren't really contested either (because the drivers passed knew they didn't have anything for the drivers passing for the lead). It seemed inconsistent for me to not count this pass as natural. Now there's a difference between that and somebody pulling over to let a teammate by via team orders, or something like the 2005 Fontana IndyCar race where Tony Kanaan clearly let off the gas coming to the checkered flag to allow his teammate Dario Franchitti to win. In that situation, those drivers didn't really actually do anything to win. While Stewart's pass of Earnhardt was uncontested, I really can't view it in the same way. Earnhardt was choosing not to fight because there really wasn't any point of it since he had to pit very soon anyway; it wasn't some sort of shadowy team tactic (now if it was a NASCAR race where one driver let his teammate pass for five bonus points, that's a different matter, but even though that was fairly common, I haven't found any NASCAR race yet where that was the deciding factor, as much as I hate bonus points for leading a single lap). Once again, many of these races are judgment calls that I may get wrong. If the leaders make front-to-rear contact and I am pretty certain that no pass would have occurred otherwise, I count it as a bump-and-run and an incidental pass. While there are way fewer spinouts for the lead than I expected (even in NASCAR) there are way more bump-and-run passes (almost exclusively in NASCAR, not surprisingly), and that surprised me. Drivers with supposedly clean reputations like Jeff Burton, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. (who benefited from three different bump-and-run passes to win races), and Bobby Labonte all won races this way, and none of these are ever talked about (although Labonte's didn't really seem to be intentional). Meanwhile, despite his supposedly dirty reputation, out of Earnhardt's 37 wins from 1990 to his death, only two of the ultimate passes were arguably dirty: his bump-and-run pass of Ernie Irvan in the 1993 Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte which dropped Irvan to 5th, and his infamous spinout of Terry Labonte at Bristol in 1999. That's it. Junior has actually won more races via a bump-and-run than Senior did in the second half of his career, as counterintuitive as that may sound. While some of these bump-and-run passes are rather subtle, I did review the video for most of these races five or ten times to decide and confirm whether I thought it was a bump-and-run pass or the 2nd place driver taking the air off the leader's spoiler. I might have gotten a few wrong, and tell me if you disagree. One thing I know I got wrong for the 1990s races is that I don't think I judged nearly enough races to be strategic assist races and I may have to go back and look closer at some of those races. I fully expected there to be fewer strategic assist races in the '90s than the 2000s because all three forms of racing had many fewer cars on the lead lap in the '90s than the '00s and NASCAR and IndyCar racing also generally had fewer cautions, and the more cautions there are, the more likely funky pit strategy is likely to decide races, but I still think it was more common than my earlier columns implied. Drivers certainly need to be compared to their era and series. Even though I'm including Champ Car and IndyCar wins together, it's clear that a far greater percentage of CART/Champ Car races were won strategically than IRL/IndyCar races, especially in this period, so even though Sam Hornish won 12 of his 14 races naturally (better than the likes of Gil de Ferran and Dario Franchitti, who had similar win totals) I still wouldn't rank him higher than them, except as an oval duelist, which was his metier. Hornish certainly did face weaker fields in the IRL than de Ferran and Franchitti generally did in CART and the IRL style of racing which emphasized passing means more races were decided by natural lead changes, but a CART natural lead change was a bigger deal because except for the Handford device races at Michigan and Fontana, on-track passing in CART and Champ Car was much more scarce, so any such pass is cherished. So no, I don't think Nigel Mansell and Greg Ray are equals just because they had 5 race wins that were all natural, but it's still an interesting way of looking at this. While comparing drivers' natural win totals to drivers in different eras (when a different percentage of races may have been decided naturally) may be foolish, I truly think comparing contemporaries' natural win totals says a lot. However, I will allow one exception here. In open wheel racing (and in NASCAR today, although not yet in the time period I have covered), it is virtually impossible for a driver with a car that is outside one of the top three premier teams or so to win a race naturally, so drivers who never landed a ride with a premier team should not necessarily be criticized for winning races in this way. Hence, comparing drivers who generally drove for top teams and those who didn't may not be valid, but comparing drivers to those who had a similar average equipment strength seems to be very valid.

Formula One 2001

Formula One 2002

Formula One 2003

Formula One 2004

Formula One 2005

Cumulative wins by type:

CART 2001

CART 2002

CCWS 2003

CCWS 2004

CCWS 2005

IRL 2001

IRL 2002

IndyCar 2003

IndyCar 2004

IndyCar 2005

Cumulative wins by type:

NASCAR Winston Cup 2001

NASCAR Winston Cup 2002

NASCAR Winston Cup 2003

NASCAR Nextel Cup 2004

NASCAR Nextel Cup 2005

Cumulative wins by type:

Sean Wrona is the Managing Editor of racermetrics.com, the Webmaster of race-database.com, the winner of the 2010 Ultimate Typing Championship at the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin, and the ratings compiler and statistician for the Mensa Scrabble-by-Mail SIG. He earned a master's in applied statistics from Cornell University in 2008 and previously digitized several seasons of NBA box scores on basketball-reference.com. You may contact him at sean@racermetrics.com.

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