2023 Cook Out Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway
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.
Darlington is the original high speed intermediate track. At 1.366-miles long the egg shaped track has 25 degree banking in turns 1 and 2 and 23 degree banking in turns 3 and 4. The track was last paved in 2008 and absolutely destroys tires.
In looking at correlation to other tracks some tracks come and go from race to race. One consistent is prior performance at Darlington. Another constant, Homestead, which is another extremely high wear steep banked intermediate track. Averaged over the long haul correlation with the 1.5-mile ovals is also fairly strong, particularly a some of the tracks have seen tire wear increase. There is even some reasonable correlation with Richmond. The Richmond correlation is likely due to the tire wear. That said, for Front Runners I’m focused on Darlington in the Gen 7 and the 1.5-maile tracks we have run in 2023.
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.
Laps run inside the Top 10, 5, 3, and led as percentage laps driver completed at Darlington (3, 2x 2022, 1x 2023), Homestead (2022), Las Vegas (2023), Kansas (2023), and Charlotte (2023)
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*Carson Hocevar has not made a Cup Series start at any of these tracks and so he is not on this chart or any of the others below.
Laps run inside the Top 10, 5, 3, and led as percentage laps driver completed in 2023 at Darlington, Las Vegas, Kansas, and Charlotte
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Laps run inside the Top 10, 5, 3, and led as percentage laps driver completed at Darlington in 2022 (2x) and 2023 (1x)
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