2013 NASCAR Thread
- Thread starter MustangRyan
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Sigh...
It drives me nuts when people act as though they understand the psychology of people they've never met. Why should it be any less plausible, for example, that a team would be "fired up" and extra motivated for the following season by coming so close that they could taste it? Even if we took for granted that there really was a loss of morale, it's a long offseason for emotions to subside, and at any rate, there are vastly more psychological factors at work than just "feeling deflated." People's motivations and insecurities are complicated - surely you know that based on the people you're close to.
Plus, it's very unclear to me how a "loss of morale" would lead to a performance the next season that was worse across the board. Under your hypothesis, then, would the wind tunnel guys be too despondent to put as much effort into their work? Would the shock specialist be haunted by memories of what went wrong in the season finale and nervously throw a totally different setup on it for fear that the same thing will happen again? Would the driver or crew chief be totally psyched out and unable to make the correct decisions on and off the track? I just don't see any plausible way for a "loss of morale" to translate into a big performance drop.
There's a much simpler way to explain the supposed effect: reversion to the mean. Teams that finish at or near the top of the point standings will have, on average, overperformed their "true talent." Maybe they randomly hit on a perfect setup a couple of times, got bitten by pit strategy a couple fewer times while having it play right into their hands a couple more times, had no engine failures all season, got caught up in only one accident not of their own making, etc. But, on average, these teams will have neutral luck the following season, so it will look like a performance dropoff even when their "luck-adjusted performance" has been just as good. My hypothesis should apply to all drivers at the top of the standings, not just the runner-up, so let's examine the historical record, beginning with the first year of the Chase for comparability's sake, to see what happened to the top three drivers the season after:
2004:
1. Kurt Busch -> 10th
2. Jimmie Johnson -> 5th
3. Jeff Gordon -> 11th
2005:
1. Tony Stewart -> 11th
2. Greg Biffle -> 13th
3. Carl Edwards -> 12th
2006:
1. Jimmie Johnson -> 1st
2. Matt Kenseth -> 4th
3. Denny Hamlin -> 12th
2007:
1. Jimmie Johnson -> 1st
2. Jeff Gordon -> 7th
3. Clint Bowyer -> 5th
2008:
1. Jimmie Johnson -> 1st
2. Carl Edwards -> 11th
3. Greg Biffle -> 7th
2009:
1. Jimmie Johnson -> 1st
2. Mark Martin -> 13th
3. Jeff Gordon -> 9th
2010:
1. Jimmie Johnson -> 6th
2. Denny Hamlin -> 9th
3. Kevin Harvick -> 3rd
2011:
1. Tony Stewart -> 9th
2. Carl Edwards -> 15th
3. Kevin Harvick -> 8th
The average dropoff from 1st place is four spots; from 2nd, 8.6 spots; and from 3rd, 6.4 spots. There's some support for the idea that second place is particularly affected, but I submit that it does not pass any test of statistical significance.
If, as you suggest, we only include drivers with a realistic shot to win in the final race,* their average finish the following year was 8.5 - but as I've already documented, this is perfectly normal for anyone near the top of the standings. As a control group - since this is a very scientific study
- I'll take all of the drivers in each season who finished fourth or better in the standings but didn't have much of a chance heading into the final race.** These drivers averaged a finish of 8.9 in the following season, i.e. slightly worse than those who did have a shot to win. Now, it's true that because they were out of contention going into Homestead, these drivers generally were a little lower in the standings in the year of interest, so we would expect them to do a little worse the year after. But even if you make a correction for that, it's hard to see any big effect from "loss of morale." Mostly, teams that do well in one season will simply do worse in the following season. Simple as that.*Johnson and Gordon in 2004; Edwards and Johnson (damn, he must have been awfully deflated after falling from second to fifth in the final race!) in 2005; Kenseth, Harvick, and Hamlin in 2006; Gordon in 2007; nobody in 2008; Martin in 2009; Hamlin and Harvick in 2010; Edwards in 2011
**Martin in 2004; Biffle and Martin in 2005; nobody in 2006; Bowyer and Kenseth in 2007; Edwards, Biffle, and Harvick in 2008; Gordon and Kurt Busch in 2009; Edwards in 2010; Harvick and Kenseth in 2011
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- Droptop2001gt
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- Droptop2001gt
That's from 2011.
It was while he was in his slump, the year following him losing the title in the final race of the 2010 season. He went from 8 wins and 14 top 5s to 1 win and 5 top 5s in a single season.
An anecdote is not a substitute for data. If you disagree, then you probably believe that flu vaccines cause autism. 
Again, as I calculated, the drivers who "came up short" in the final race of the season still did better the next year than the rest of the drivers in the top four in the standings. I acknowledge that in occasional individual cases, psychological considerations are relevant. But it's clear that they just aren't very important in the aggregate.
Even in Hamlin's case, who's to say that psychological issues were his problem? It would be one thing if an independent psychologist approached him and said, "I think I know what your problems are." But Hamlin sought out and paid for a sports psychologist who has an incentive to make Hamlin believe that he can fix Hamlin's problems. Furthermore, as I've shown, Hamlin's performance was almost certain to fall off in 2011 regardless of psychology. If he came into the season believing, as he almost certainly did, that his team was championship-worthy and he had let them down, then wouldn't he be predisposed to automatically ascribe any downturn in performance to psychological factors, regardless of what actually caused it? It's not easy to recognize that a near-championship season the year prior was fairly fluky and the apparent dropoff is simply a product of good luck returning to neutral. There are just so many reasons why this story isn't good evidence of the general phenomenon you're postulating.
Edit: If you aren't prepared to accept that random statistical variation is responsible for the majority of year-to-year fluctuations in performance, perhaps it's fair to consider that a team that has been successful might get stuck in a rut trying to use the same setups and whatnot that worked the previous year, rather than be willing to try new ideas that may be riskier but will ultimately permit the team to keep up with the constant evolution of knowledge in the sport. But I think the psychological explanation is on extremely shaky ground. There's just not much reason to believe in it, given the available data. And, after all, racers are used to dealing with failure.
Again, as I calculated, the drivers who "came up short" in the final race of the season still did better the next year than the rest of the drivers in the top four in the standings. I acknowledge that in occasional individual cases, psychological considerations are relevant. But it's clear that they just aren't very important in the aggregate.Even in Hamlin's case, who's to say that psychological issues were his problem? It would be one thing if an independent psychologist approached him and said, "I think I know what your problems are." But Hamlin sought out and paid for a sports psychologist who has an incentive to make Hamlin believe that he can fix Hamlin's problems. Furthermore, as I've shown, Hamlin's performance was almost certain to fall off in 2011 regardless of psychology. If he came into the season believing, as he almost certainly did, that his team was championship-worthy and he had let them down, then wouldn't he be predisposed to automatically ascribe any downturn in performance to psychological factors, regardless of what actually caused it? It's not easy to recognize that a near-championship season the year prior was fairly fluky and the apparent dropoff is simply a product of good luck returning to neutral. There are just so many reasons why this story isn't good evidence of the general phenomenon you're postulating.
Edit: If you aren't prepared to accept that random statistical variation is responsible for the majority of year-to-year fluctuations in performance, perhaps it's fair to consider that a team that has been successful might get stuck in a rut trying to use the same setups and whatnot that worked the previous year, rather than be willing to try new ideas that may be riskier but will ultimately permit the team to keep up with the constant evolution of knowledge in the sport. But I think the psychological explanation is on extremely shaky ground. There's just not much reason to believe in it, given the available data. And, after all, racers are used to dealing with failure.
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- Droptop2001gt
That seems perfectly logical, and an acceptable way to generalize about me.Austin343An anecdote is not a substitute for data. If you disagree, then you probably believe that flu vaccines cause autism.
If you are going to talk about data and regression to the mean, you are going to have to admit that what you are trying to prove has too small of a sample size to be conclusive. Almost any findings could be validated or invalidated with so little data to parse.
Also, data alone can not be used as the end-all, be-all in analysis of anything in a vacuum. In a perfect world, data is used in conjunction with observational analysis to provide the most complete possible understanding.
While eight wins a season is very likely to be unsustainable, dropping to just one win and being mostly not competitive for the entire season following was way more than just regression to the mean.
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- 5,897
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- The_Bman24
I thought that you brought up that article because you thought it was new. Now I know why you posted that.
I do understand that it's more related to morale than bad luck. You go into the next season thinking that you can build off of the momentum from last year, only to be a disappointment, finishing in the standings worse than the year before due to the team and driver making more mistakes. The year where the driver had motivation and strength shows to be a peak in performance, and you can't just stay on top of that peak forever. Then comes next year, where you either climb down or fall off of that peak.
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That seems perfectly logical, and an acceptable way to generalize about me.
If you are going to talk about data and regression to the mean, you are going to have to admit that what you are trying to prove has too small of a sample size to be conclusive. Almost any findings could be validated or invalidated with so little data to parse.
Also, data alone can not be used as the end-all, be-all in analysis of anything in a vacuum. In a perfect world, data is used in conjunction with observational analysis to provide the most complete possible understanding.
While eight wins a season is very likely to be unsustainable, dropping to just one win and being mostly not competitive for the entire season following was way more than just regression to the mean.
The flu-shot thing was unnecessary - sorry. And I completely agree with your second and third paragraphs. But the way statistics works is that there's no way to "prove" the null hypothesis, i.e. that there's no effect from falling short. You can only ever say that there's insufficient data to disprove it. So I'm never going to be able to say with total certainty that there's no effect, but the data strongly suggests that the huge effect that your hypothesis would imply is just not present.
To bolster my sample size, I went back to the pre-Chase modern era (1975-2003), and found that the 16 drivers who fell short in the final race of the season had an average finish of 3.9 in the following season, including the massive outlier of Mark Martin's 2003 (17th). Meanwhile, my control, drivers who finished second and third in the standings but were out of contention by the finale averaged a finish of 4.9 the next year, with no real outliers (a couple of 14ths were the most outlying figures, out of many more data points). This is completely consistent with my hypothesis, and this is stronger evidence than in my original post because a) the sample is larger and b) the Chase-induced effect of randomness in the finishing order is greatly dampened.
The thing is that what you're arguing is not observational analysis - it's talking out of your ass, to put it impolitely. Your original post was just baseless speculation, based on no evidence whatsoever other than two cherry-picked examples. There are much better ways to make your argument. Perhaps if people on Hamlin's team talked about everyone being tense right from the beginning of the season, that would be a plausible explanation. (If they were tense during the middle or end of the season, that wouldn't mean anything, because it would more likely be the result rather than the cause of the mediocre performance.) Also, there are probably psychological studies on the effect of disappointment on job performance and teamwork. And I don't know if there's any data available on the effectiveness of sports psychologists, but I can definitely imagine that they could make a significant difference. But I would only trust an expert to engage in observational analysis. Since we don't have any expertise, I think we have to rely on data. It doesn't necessarily have to be the very direct kind of data I'm using, but it has to have some kind of quantitative grounding. Otherwise, we're engaging in speculation without any real grounds for it.
It's a poor argument, by the way, to say that Hamlin and his team obviously got much worse because they went from eight wins to one. That isn't how statistics works. You don't expect everyone to have average luck in the following season; you expect some teams to have good luck and others to have bad luck, and the average of all of these teams' luck will be average. Hamlin easily could have been one of the "unlucky" ones. Now, given that they didn't lead nearly as many laps or run nearly as close to the front, I'm quite willing to accept that Edwards' and Hamlin's bad seasons were in part due to psychological factors. But I think other factors, like getting stuck in a rut with setups and getting "unlucky" in a variety of subtle and unsubtle ways, were partly or largely responsible, and at any rate I think these two were an exception. Most drivers and teams just aren't affected by coming up short at Homestead.
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- Droptop2001gt
I definitely believe this is a plausible possibility, especially in today's NASCAR, where everyone is under intense pressure to perform now, or be out of a job. This isn't the NASCAR of the 80's and 90's, where teams could keep sponsors and ride around for years, regardless of their performance.
In today's NASCAR economy, the need for sponsor dollars to compete is at its highest level ever, while the number of companies willing to spend their money putting their logo on the hood of a car is probably at its lowest level ever. This puts an enormous amount of pressure on the teams that are actually trying to win races. Even Matt Kenseth was having trouble getting a full-time sponsor, even after winning his second Daytona 500 earlier this season. Tony Stewart, the defending series champion, lost a major sponsor not even 10 months after putting together the most dominant run ever in the Chase. There's always a pressure to perform now, or else. Darian Grubb could probably vouch for this.
I think the crew chief and driver chemistry has a lot to do with it, and could be a plausible explanation for this small pattern that appears to be developing. When Brian Pattie put 4 tires on JPM's dominant #42 Target car late in the 2010 Brickyard 400, it was the wrong call. A lot of drivers took 2 tires, and Montoya couldn't get back through the traffic at Indy, even with two more new tires. McMurray won a big race where Montoya clearly had the dominant car on the day. The failure to win that race shattered the driver's confidence with Pattie. If you listened to their team radio, you could hear Montoya's faith in his CC had completely disintegrated in the races that followed. He would frequently question calls on pit road, would ask if he was sure, and would tell Pattie after the pit stops that they keep making the same mistakes. I think he even called Pattie out the following weekend at Pocono, because they did the exact same thing again, taking 4 when everyone else took 2 tires, losing track position. Afterwards, Pattie started leaning too heavily on two-tire stops, especially early in races, and it was almost always the wrong call. Less than a year later, Pattie was out of a job, mostly because he and Montoya couldn't coexist. Chip Ganassi wasn't going to keep Pattie and get rid of Montoya.
Also, I think any discussion of driver/crew cheif cohesion would be incomplete if we failed to talk about how Dale Jr went through the slump of his life with Lance McGrew, then came to life with Steve Letarte. Do we really think Dale Jr forgot how to drive for four years, or that his HMS-prepped cars suddenly got a lot faster just because Steve Letarte was talking to him during the race? Or, was the driver's confidence restored, and his performance came up with it?
I think there is definitely something in the psyche of the driver that affects their performance on track. The fact that Hamlin and Edwards both had new crew chiefs less than a year after losing the title shows that someone believed something was wrong somewhere in that area.
The other thing you have to remember is that Hamlin and Edwards both went into Homestead with the points lead, and lost the championship on the track on the final day. The last time I remember the points lead actually changing hands in the final race was 1992, when Alan Kulwicki passed Davey Allison and held off race-winner Bill Elliott by virtue of leading the most laps. Of course, you can't really take anything from that, since both Allison and Kulwicki lost their lives during the course of the following season.
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CodeRedR51
Premium
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What's with the walls of text. 
This is a NASCAR thread, no need to get serious.
This is a NASCAR thread, no need to get serious.
Thanks - that was a very good post. I agree that the pressure on the drivers is probably more intense these days; media scrutiny is much greater, and yes, you're in much more danger of losing your ride because sponsorship dollars are so capricious. You may also be right that losing the championship on the final day, specifically, is particularly crushing. That's where looking at the following year's standings really can't help much, and it's much more informative to turn as you did to things like crew chief swaps. And he Brian Pattie thing is an excellent example of where psychology can matter.
I would quibble with your assessment of Dale Jr. and Lance McGrew, though. I don't think it necessarily has to do with Junior's confidence - after all, the crew chief is the guy in charge of setups. McGrew may well have been atrocious at that aspect of his job. Or, perhaps more likely, Junior and McGrew may have been totally unable to communicate on the same level. I suspect you've had this happen to you, where you and your coworker or fellow student just completely fail to understand each other for no obvious reason. It's frustrating as hell, and it's surely almost impossible for a team to perform well when the driver and crew chief can't communicate effectively on setup or strategy. I think either of these explanations is more convincing than lost confidence, particularly given the number of times I vividly remember Junior being totally out to lunch on the setup and, in at least a couple of cases, falling multiple laps down purely as a result of being so slow.
- 2,429
- Heaven's Fence
- Anathema-Kure
- Justin Jectlol
What's with the walls of text.
This is a NASCAR thread, no need to get serious.
NASCAR is one of the most serious sports - redneck beer hall debates are one of the things that make this country great.
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opelgt1969
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- opelgt1969
Danica to be single next year.
http://sports.yahoo.com/news/danica-patrick-divorcing-husband-7-200408385--nascar.html
http://sports.yahoo.com/news/danica-patrick-divorcing-husband-7-200408385--nascar.html
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- Carbonox
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- The_Bman24
But he's only 17, is he not? Ruin his moment by saying he can't legally marry yet.
Anyways, what is with people saying that Matt Kenseth will end up being the champion? Yes, he's going to a new team and is very skilled, but honestly he's not as good as you guys think he is. I know that it's your opinion, but it just bothers me how he's always at the top on people's predictions.
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LOL at the comments.
- 11,573
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- Carbonox
But he's only 17, is he not? Ruin his moment by saying he can't legally marry yet.
Anyways, what is with people saying that Matt Kenseth will end up being the champion? Yes, he's going to a new team and is very skilled, but honestly he's not as good as you guys think he is. I know that it's your opinion, but it just bothers me how he's always at the top on people's predictions.
That's 'cause all those people are bored of Johnson, hate Kyle Busch, and don't believe in 2 titles in a row for Brad.
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I don't think he can win under the chase, his strength is being consistent over long periods of time, 10 races just isn't long enough. That and there will be some growing pains with JGR, probably along the lines of what Kahne went through this year.
- 5,897
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- The_Bman24
That's 'cause all those people are bored of Johnson, hate Kyle Busch, and don't believe in 2 titles in a row for Brad.
I went with Hamlin since he has been running strong his entire career (with the exception of his 2011 slump) and has a great team. Kenseth has consistancy although the Chase is a see-saw for him, where he does great in some races, not so much in others.
My dark horse pick for the championship would definitely be Kasey Kahne. He ran strong last year and although I don't expect him to perform as well as last year, he'll still run strong. Maybe he will be able to pick up a few wins and make a run for the title.
I'm betting less.
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- ganon83
If it wasn't for medicore runs at Texas and Homestead, he'd probably be up there with Brad in the final point standings. However, Kasey's big problem is that he can't turn top 10s and top 15s into top 5s, and top 5s into wins.
Nonetheless, I do think Kasey will be a force to be reckoned with next season if he can fix that problem. This was his first season at Hendrick, and he proved why he'll be there for many years to come (As long as his knee doesn't give out, that thing has to be nothing but steel with all the surgerys he has had on it
)
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- Droptop2001gt
I think Kenseth could have a very strong year next season. He is a very experienced driver that takes care of his equipment, and rarely makes mistakes. He (and all the Roush drivers) have been pretty weak on flat tracks like Martinsville and Phoenix in the past. But, guess where JGR is very strong?
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It's the offseason and the media has to talk about something.
Edit: I wonder if any NASCAR drivers will be invited to the RoC? Ryan Hunter-Reay from IndyCar has been confirmed but the other U.S. entrant hasn't and the Awards Banquet falls on a different weekend this year(unlike last year).
