The Kings Of Restrictor Plate-Racing
In honor of NASCAR's first 2023 trip to Talladega, let's look at the drivers who specialize in controlled chaos.
Dale Earnhardt hated restrictor-plate racing.
Ever since 1988, when NASCAR introduced a safety mechanism to limit engines’ air intake (and therefore reduce top speeds) at big superspeedways, the seven-time Cup Series champion had always complained whenever the devices were employed. He despised how they artificially created close packs of cars running next to each other on the track, where the slightest mistake by any of them would inevitably lead to a huge wreck known as “the Big One”. To Earnhardt, that wasn’t real racing.
"I hate restrictor-plate races,” Earnhardt said after racing at Talladega in the fall of 2000. “All of 'em. None of 'em are good."
There was just one ironic detail about Earnhardt’s grousing: He had just won the race, his eighth victory at Talladega since the restrictor-plate era began and 11th at plate tracks overall — nearly double what anyone else had at the time. Earnhardt was so good at the type of tight, close-drafting, pack racing he hated that he was nicknamed “Mr. Restrictor Plate”.
The stats also bear out how good the late, great Dale Sr. was at plate tracks. Among all drivers with at least 20 races at Talladega, Daytona and a few others — New Hampshire in 2000; Atlanta since 2022 — nobody has been better according to either my Pts+ index (adjusted points per race relative to a Cup Series average of 100) or my Composite Winning % metric (which judges a driver relative to his competitors while attempting to adjust for differences in equipment quality)… and it’s not even remotely close.
(For the purposes of this story, NASCAR’s more recent switch to tapered spacers at plate tracks is treated the same as the original restrictor plates, since both serve to reduce speed and encourage pack racing.)
Being able to “see the air” of the draft at superspeedways seems to run in families, because Earnhardt’s son, Dale Jr., was also one of the best plate-racers in history (even if he wasn’t quite as good at it as his dad).
Of course, the Earnhardts were really successful everywhere they drove — especially Dale Sr., for whom a very good case could be made as the greatest driver in Cup Series history — so it stands to reason that they would also do well in plate races. But did they do better than we would expect from their track records everywhere else?
As it turns out, most great drivers actually do much worse at restrictor-plate tracks than they do at non-plate tracks. For instance, Kevin Harvick has the best Composite W% of any driver in modern Cup Series history, but there’s a big difference between his success rate at non-plate tracks (73.4%) and at Talladega/Daytona/etc. (61.5%). It’s not that Harvick is notably bad at plate-racing — he actually has exactly the Composite W% at plate tracks that we’d expect from his performance at non-plate tracks. But because plate-racing is so chaotic and unpredictable, even the best drivers get regressed strongly to the mean at those tracks.
Well, most do — but there was one major exception.
Here’s a plot of every restrictor plate-era driver who ran at least 20 races at plate tracks and at least 150 at non-plate tracks, showing their Composite W% at the former versus what we would expect it to be based on their performance at the latter (using a regression to create those expectations):
Remarkably, Earnhardt had a higher Composite W% at restrictor-plate tracks (77.0%) than he did at all non-plate tracks (74.4%), despite plate-racing’s usual penchant for humbling even the most talented of drivers. That makes him a true outlier on the chart above, with a plate-track success rate 15.3 percentage points higher than we would expect if his performance dropped off according to the same pattern as other drivers.
While the danger of the superspeedway did eventually take its toll on Dale Sr. — he lost his life in a “Big One” type of wreck at Daytona in 2001 — until then, Earnhardt was a true master of controlling the uncontrollable. And all of that was on display even through his final victory at Talladega, 23 years ago. Just ask the delightful Kenny Wallace — one of my personal favorite people in all of NASCAR, and Earnhardt’s unexpected drafting partner for that race:
“That’s Earnhardt’s legacy,” Wallace said when recollecting that race. “He represents the working man. Don’t never give up.”
“We’re starting last, we got 10 [laps] to go, we might as well try. We were down and out, but he never gave up. And he inspired me — I said, ‘Hell, since you ain’t giving up, I ain’t giving up either.’ That was vintage Earnhardt.”
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