2023 NASCAR Cup season numbers

Building Speed’s Dr. Diandra Leslie-Pelecky has crunched the numbers on the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series season. A look at just a few of the stats:

The NASCAR Cup Series…

Was scheduled to run 9,352 laps in 2023, but actually ran 9,375 laps. Fans got to see an extra 23 laps
Chris Buescher ran the most of those total possible laps of any driver: 9,225 laps, or 98.4% of all laps possible.
Kevin Harvick was second with 98.3%.
Bubba Wallace was third with 9,188 or 98.0%
Only two full-time drivers ran less than 90% of the laps this year: Daniel Suárez (89.5%) and Ty Dillon (88.9%)

Drivers

Race Duration

The Coca-Cola 600 was the longest race of the year in time, running 4 hours, 58 minutes, 50 seconds, not including red-flag breaks.
The Bristol Dirt Race, however, takes the record for least efficient. Drivers spent an average of two hours to run every 100 miles. The race itself was only 133 miles — thankfully.
Watkins Glen was the shortest race of the season, due primarily to NASCAR eliminating stage breaks. It took just 1 hour, 58 minutes and 44 seconds to complete. It was the only sub-two hour race this year.

Cautions

There were 252 cautions this year, accounting for 14.7% of the laps run. That’s a significant drop from last year, which had 302 cautions.

Drivers and Cautions

Kyle Larson was involved in the largest number of cautions of any full-time driver. With 19 total cautions, that more than one caution every two races. Christopher Bell came in second with 17 cautions. Ty Gibbs and Brad Keselowski tied for third with 16 caution involvements each. Suarez and Reddick were each involved in 15 cautions.

DNFs

The 2023 season saw a substantial decrease in the number of DNFs relative to 2022: From 217 last year to 167 this year, a drop of 50. The data presented here suggests that 2022 was more of an exception than the start of a paradigm shift. Most numbers are trending back to pre-Next Gen levels.

See much more at Building Speed.

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