The Nature of Lap Raptor

NASCAR has launched a new foray into advanced driver metrics. This is good: NASCAR sorely needs new ways to sell its talent.

However, this has no impact on Lap Raptor. NASCAR's new ratings are different from the advanced statistics and analytics that Lap Raptor provides. The difference between the new NASCAR metrics and Lap Raptor metrics is physicality.

NASCAR's new metrics are composite and formulaic. They're intended to aggregate driver performance in specific situations to provide relative rankings of drivers.

Compare this to the primary Lap Raptor metrics, which are grounded in scales or factors you see when watching by races:

• PFAE is positions finished above expected.
• Success rate is how frequently a driver finishes above their expected finish.
• cPOMS — continuously graded percent of max speed — is how close driver’s lap is to the fastest speed on that lap, averaged out. It's a track-normalized average lap speed.

When I walk around and I think about a new way to try to capture driver talent or team quality, it's always been important to me that these techniques can be physically explained and easily understood. Perhaps that formulation is complicated or I've given it a verbose name, but at the base, I've pictured a skeptical broadcaster or skeptical team member seeing the numbers: I want the metrics to be based on the axioms of the sport so that the only barrier to understanding is learning the definition of the metric.

I hope this new endeavor for NASCAR leads to them making more low-level data available to the fan analytics community. We're seeing a growing community pop up over NASCAR analytics. They should feed that apparent hunger.