2025 NASCAR Cup Series Year in Review

The table above is cropped from my NASCAR Cup Series spreadsheet, which I finished after last Sunday’s race. As with all my tables, it consists of NRL (natural races led; the number of races where each driver made an on-track pass for the lead), LCR (lead change record; the number of times each driver made an on-track pass for the lead followed by the number of times they were passed for the lead), W (wins), TNL (terminal natural leader; the number of times each driver was the last driver to make an on-track pass for the lead), LS (lead shares; my statistic to measure each driver’s share of on-track passing in the same vein as Bill James’s Win Shares), LSL (races with the most lead shares), CRL (cumulative races led, which is the sum of percent led per race over the entire season), LML (races with the most laps led), P (poles), FL (fastest laps), FR (fastest races; races with the fastest average speed when including only drivers who completed 75% of the race distance and only laps within 10% of each driver’s fastest lap time), and SP (speed percentile; the average number of drivers each driver is faster than using the data I used to calculate FR). Finally, RTG is each driver’s rating in my stock car model based on 2025 Cup Series races only, where each driver’s rating reflects the probability of beating the average driver at the Cup Series level - 0.5. This should not be new to most of you, but I’m planning a YouTube video where I’m going to among other things boost this blog so I thought I’d provide a refresher for any new subscribers I may get from that. (I think the main thing I’m going to do with that video besides updating on my mom is start digging out my home videos, which are already digitized on my computer and upload them to YouTube). While I provide the raw data above, the deeper analysis will be behind the paywall.