It’s (Still) Kyle Larson’s Cup Series Championship to Lose
The best driver in NASCAR is a clear favorite — but he hasn’t crossed the finish line just yet.
Some great athletes have a flair for the dramatic. Others, by contrast, are so dominant that they suck all of the drama out of the situation. Such was the case with Kyle Larson last Saturday night at Bristol Motor Speedway. In an elimination race — albeit one that he was relatively safe to advance from — Larson blew away the field, leading 462 of a possible 500 laps and sweeping the stages en route to one of the most overwhelming performances in playoff history.
Here are the leaders for the highest Driver Rating — think QB rating from football (just as arbitrary, but at least less prone to historical inflation) — and the highest share of laps led in any postseason race since the current knockout format was adopted in 2014:
When Larson and his No. 5 HendrickCars.com Chevy run as well as they did at Bristol, it’s difficult to imagine how the best driver in NASCAR — if not the entire world — won’t win his second career Cup Series title. And he is the favorite for a reason. But it is also possible for one of the other 11 remaining playoff drivers to wrest the crown away from Larson when the smoke clears on the season.
To see just how strong of a favorite Larson is, let’s once again examine the odds from my NASCAR forecast model, which simulates the rest of the playoffs 10,000 times to determine who has the best probability of advancing and, eventually, winning the title:
(One quick note on the model: I have tweaked the process and code somewhat since last week, after uncovering a situation where top drivers were disproportionately likely to finish last conditional on not finishing in the top half of the race. This didn’t come up often, and the odds above are similar to what they were before the fix, but it’s important to be transparent about any changes in a model!)1
Indeed, Larson’s odds of winning the title are more than 10 percentage points higher than those of second-ranked Tyler Reddick and third-ranked Christopher Bell. This speaks not only to Larson’s general dominance, but also his incredibly high chance (98 percent) of advancing from the Round of 12, due to a combination of factors.
First of all, he starts the Round of 12 with a commanding 39-point edge over the cutline; the distance between points leader Larson and No. 2 Bell (+15) is greater than the distance between No. 4 William Byron and the cut (+14). While it's possible for some active drivers to gain at least 40 net points on Larson over the next three races — an average of 1.1 managed it per run in my simulated scenarios — the likelihood of five different drivers doing so (the minimum needed to knock him out of the next round, assuming three additional race winners also clinch spots) was just 5.7 percent, happening 566 times out of 10,000 simulations. And eight different drivers leapfogged him on points just 0.92 percent of the time.
Second, he is set up with some choice tracks to work with in this round. Yes, Larson is actually surprisingly weak on restrictor-plate tracks like Talladega, where the Series will head on October 6. Larson’s Adjusted Points+ index on drafting tracks is 45 percent worse than average this season, and it was 59 percent below average last year. But he makes up for that with a strong record on road courses like the Charlotte Roval (which hosts the Round of 12 finale). And nobody is more dominant on intermediates like Kansas, where Larson will drive this weekend. He’ll be the favorite to immediately win again on the heels of his stellar Bristol run.
So, yeah… Larson is probably going to stick around for a while. The only things that might really trip him up are poor showings at both Kansas and the Roval, although even in the rare cases where he finishes outside the Top 30 in both races, he still would retain a 45 percent chance to advance because of his big points cushion and the fact that anything can happen at Talladega.
What’s the rest of the playoff field to do, then?
Well, Reddick and Bell are also in great shape to advance, with odds in excess of 90 percent to make the Round of 8. Reddick is dominant on road courses like Larson is on ovals, and he’s no slouch on the other track types of this round, either. And Bell is a brilliant all-around driver who’s spotted himself an immediate 24-point cushion over the cutline.
The next tier of drivers from here is really interesting. It features Byron, Denny Hamlin — who salvaged his elusive championship hopes (for now) with a fourth-place run at Bristol — Chase Elliott and Ryan Blaney. All but Hamlin carries at least a 75 percent chance to roll past the Round of 12, but Denny is plagued by another bad selection of tracks in this set of races. He has been 55 percent worse than the Cup Series average on road courses this season, and a stunning (for a 3-time Daytona winner) 66 percent worse on plate tracks. That makes the mile-and-a-half oval at Kansas this weekend yet another high-leverage race to keep Hamlin’s hopes of advancing high:
And then there are the remaining five drivers in the playoff hunt: Joey Logano, Alex Bowman, Daniel Suarez, Chase Briscoe and Austin Cindric. All check in below 60 percent to make it through to the Round of 8, and it makes sense on some level — while Bowman has been 36 percent better than an average driver this season, the rest are less than 20 percent above the norm. (Suarez has been completely average; Cindric remains 16 percent below average even after a solid opening round of the playoffs.) All but Logano must also make up a deficit to the cutline as well.
But it’s still worth keeping an eye on this group as potential spoilers for the favorites. Logano was the series champion as recently as two years ago, and he remains a legitimate threat if he can advance, just because of the tracks of the next two rounds. Bowman is more than just the fourth wheel at Hendrick, and deserves a chance to outdrive his more well-regarded teammates. Briscoe has his best track type coming up and Kansas. And both Suarez and Cindric could crank their advancement odds up into the mid-to-high 60 percent range with Top 10s this weekend.
In other words, Larson still has a lot of road to cover before he can claim the 2024 Cup Series title — even if he occupies the driver’s seat at the moment.
Filed under: NASCAR, NASCAR Playoff Odds
The way the original method worked, it would select a driver at random for first place according to everyone’s odds of finishing first, then remove them, rescale the remaining odds and pick second place, etc. The problem, though, was that conditional on not finishing in one of the upper spots, top drivers were actually becoming less likely to be selected for mid-to-low spots either, causing the algorithm to dump them near the end when it ran out of other choices.
After experimenting with various different fixes, the new method selects an initial placement for every driver at once, in accordance with their pre-race odds of finishing in each slot, then breaks any ties from there. This resolves the seeming paradox of better drivers being less likely to finish higher than worse drivers, conditional on not being selected early in the process.