Stat Pack Recap: 2024 Cup Series ROVAL 400
Kyle Larson won and is the championship favorite as things stand after this tepid race.
Race: Results | Analytics | Loop Data | Lap-by-lap Download
Qualifying: Results and lap download
Final practice: Results and lap download
Practice: Results and lap download
This was a bit of a stinker. Kyle Larson led effectively 80% of the race: once he took the lead at the end of the first stage, his only laps scored out of first place involved yellow flags. Larson's weighted average running position (wARP) was 1.61.
This was Larson's sixth win of the year, which is double that of anyone else in the series — Denny Hamlin, Christopher Bell, and William Byron, the latter two of whom finished second and third in this race, each have three. It's also Larson's second road course win of the year after he won at Sonoma in June.
With two intermediates, Las Vegas and Homestead, and two short tracks, Martinsville and Phoenix (somehow, in that exact order), remaining, Larson must be the championship favorite. He leads the field by twenty points and, by my math, is a full race above the cutline for the final four.
On intermediate tracks, he has the second-best GR-LR, which is good at measuring how well drivers and cars can gain position, behind only points sixth-place Hamlin. He has the third-best ARP behind Hamlin and Ty Gibbs, who was eliminated from the playoffs early in the race with engine troubles. While Larson has the eighth-best average finish, he has two wins. No one else has more than one.
He has the third-best GR-LR on short tracks, behind points second-place Bell and Hamlin. He also has the second-best ARP after Hamlin and shares the best short track average finish with Chase Elliott, who is seventh in the playoff standings.
Larson and Bell should be good to go to the final four. Bell has been a strong performer in aggregate across the intermediates and short tracks. Hamlin is first or second in every advanced metric on the final two track types: I think he'll be able to overcome his points deficit. Any of Tyler Reddick, Ryan Blaney, Byron, or Elliott could win their way into the fourth spot. Reddick, Blaney, and Byron have the underlying numbers on intermediates to do, while Elliott has the second-best AFP. Reddick will have to get his numbers on intermediates, as he's not been as strong as the others on short tracks. Joey Logano is a clear eighth-best.
Notes on the rest of the field:
- Austin Cindric finished fourth. Since he entered the Cup field full-time in 2022, he has the fifth-best AFP on road courses, besting even aces like Shane Van Gisbergen and AJ Allmendinger
- Denny Hamlin, on the other hand, finished fourteenth. He's not been very good on road courses. In the NextGen era, his road course AFP is 20.76. He has the third-worst PFAE at -4.563.
- Bubba Wallace on road courses since 2021. He finished ninth today, as he continues to improve:
| Season | Starts | ASP | ARP | AFP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 7 | 21.00 | 23.71 | 21.86 |
| 2022 | 6 | 21.83 | 22.07 | 26.00 |
| 2023 | 6 | 13.00 | 17.16 | 21.83 |
| 2024 | 5 | 15.00 | 19.79 | 14.80 |
Results
| Driver | Start | Finish | ARP | PGAE | GR-LR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kyle Larson | 6 | 1 | 2.11 | 8.12 | 2.92 |
| Christopher Bell | 12 | 2 | 5.27 | 11.68 | 3.35 |
| William Byron | 10 | 3 | 7.51 | 16.83 | 2.43 |
| Austin Cindric | 5 | 4 | 7.41 | 30.37 | 1.85 |
| Chase Elliott | 7 | 5 | 10.28 | 35.15 | 1.81 |