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Post by seanford on Oct 12, 2018 14:28:31 GMT -5
That’s stuff that is unpredictable, everyone’s mindset should be to win a race, even back in 1976. You said that Johnson’s strategy would’ve been different in 2004, so would everyone else, including Gordon. But even by your predictions Johnson would be 3-5 and Gordon would be a 5-6.
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AndersonWhitt
Junior Member
Filling out my status. (Photo by Ted Van Pelt.)
Posts: 79
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Post by AndersonWhitt on Oct 12, 2018 14:44:57 GMT -5
Factoring in how drivers would have raced differently under the full-season points system, I think Jeff Gordon would have won in 2007, and maybe 2014, but likely not in 2004.
That would give him 5 or 6 championships (although I also think he deserved the championship in 1996, which would have given him 6-7, including 4 in a row from 1995-1998; then again, Dale Jarrett had an unfair penalty at a road course race in 1997, so Jarrett may have deserved the championship that year).
In 2004, Jimmie Johnson's team seemed to be experimenting in the summer, since they had three engine failures in a row. He was only 47 points behind Gordon, so if he'd finished these races, he would have won the championship (unless Gordon improved, too, but I don't think Gordon's team experimented as much).
In 2007, Gordon did way better than Johnson over the course of the season, and even though Johnson's team likely experimented some, I still think Gordon would have won.
In 2014, based on Mile501's analysis, it would have been a close battle between Gordon and Logano, and either of them could have won. Mile501 guesses Logano would have won, since Logano's team may have experimented but Gordon's didn't.
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Post by chevyfan98 on Oct 12, 2018 15:09:23 GMT -5
The whole debate about who would've/should've won every championship during the chase era is so dumb. You don't have to like the chase but every driver knows the rules at the beginning of the season and they're racing to win the championship under the current points format, not one from years or even decades ago. Nobody "should have" any more or less championships than they do just because they scored the most points under different rules. Now obviously there's exceptions to this (like William Byron in the truck series a few years ago losing the championship because of something completely out of his control) but if we're just talking about a case where one driver was dominant for most of the season but someone else got hot at the right time and beat them straight up (which is pretty much every year from 2004-2013 where the regular season champion was different from the actual champion), then don't blame the chase, blame the guy who choked.
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Post by seanford on Oct 12, 2018 18:04:40 GMT -5
The chase is messed up. It doesn’t reward the best driver. It’s just full of flukes. that’s why I wouldn’t compare jimmie Johnson to Earnhardt and petty. Their championships had to do with pure dominance, without much luck.
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Post by xxplode on Oct 12, 2018 18:22:56 GMT -5
The whole debate about who would've/should've won every championship during the chase era is so dumb. You don't have to like the chase but every driver knows the rules at the beginning of the season and they're racing to win the championship under the current points format, not one from years or even decades ago. Nobody "should have" any more or less championships than they do just because they scored the most points under different rules. Now obviously there's exceptions to this (like William Byron in the truck series a few years ago losing the championship because of something completely out of his control) but if we're just talking about a case where one driver was dominant for most of the season but someone else got hot at the right time and beat them straight up (which is pretty much every year from 2004-2013 where the regular season champion was different from the actual champion), then don't blame the chase, blame the guy who choked. I'm with you. It's a really dumb debate, and is just alternate history. There is too many different variables in too many different situations. I don't give a hoot about who would have won what in a different system at a different time. All this what if stuff is a waste of time. I'm at the point where I'm done doing any type of a subjective ranking in NASCAR. I'm more interested in the stats and facts. Period.
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Post by Maverick18 on Oct 12, 2018 18:58:49 GMT -5
Championships don't mean shit unless the best driver of the year wins it. Therefore I will continue to dissect and discard chase titles as I please, or I will just straight up ignore them when comparing drivers.
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Post by chevyfan98 on Oct 12, 2018 20:08:44 GMT -5
Championships don't mean shit unless the best driver of the year wins it. Therefore I will continue to dissect and discard chase titles as I please, or I will just straight up ignore them when comparing drivers. Yeah I should've worded that better. Of course we can always debate whether or not the champion was the best driver all season but being the most deserving isn't necessarily the same thing, I don't think a driver deserves the championship if they just aren't good enough in the part of the season that they know matters most (on that we shall agree to disagree though).
But yeah I put way less stock into championships since 2014 when ranking drivers, at least with the old chase it came down to ten races instead of just one.
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Post by Maverick18 on Oct 12, 2018 20:45:57 GMT -5
Championships don't mean shit unless the best driver of the year wins it. Therefore I will continue to dissect and discard chase titles as I please, or I will just straight up ignore them when comparing drivers. Yeah I should've worded that better. Of course we can always debate whether or not the champion was the best driver all season but being the most deserving isn't necessarily the same thing, I don't think a driver deserves the championship if they just aren't good enough in the part of the season that they know matters most (on that we shall agree to disagree though).
But yeah I put way less stock into championships since 2014 when ranking drivers, at least with the old chase it came down to ten races instead of just one.
Just for grins, here’s who I think was the best driver (therefore champion in my mind) each year: 2004- Johnson 2005- Stewart 2006- Johnson 2007- Gordon 2008- Edwards 2009- Johnson 2010- Johnson 2011- Tossup, I guess Edwards if I had to choose 2012- Johnson 2013- Johnson 2014- Tossup between Gordon, Keselowski, and Logano 2015- Harvick 2016- Harvick 2017- Truex 2018- Still 6 races left, but right now I don’t even think I could choose one But with the championships meaning less and less at this point, I value domination at all types of tracks over championships, so I think Kyle definitely has the potential to become one of the greatest even though he currently has just 1 “championship” to his name.
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sean
Assistant Moderator
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Post by sean on Oct 12, 2018 22:00:12 GMT -5
No, you can't realistically use the actual finishing results to predict what it would have been like without a chase. I mean if there had been a chase in 1992, Kyle Petty would have won it but I bet he would not have if it actually existed. One of the big reasons is that teams would naturally put emphasis on setting up their cars for tracks that have chase races and tend to neglect those that don't. I'm sure teams would care more about the tracks they only race at one time in the summer like Sonoma, Indy (based on its historical position), and Watkins Glen if they raced at those tracks again in the chase. I'm sure teams are more inclined to do their testing at chase tracks than non-chase tracks, etc... Odds are teams that primarily focused on the chase (like the 48) would have had a lot stronger summers using the old points system.
What matters to me more is what you do in your accumulated career rather than the specific number of wins or titles per se. You can be lucky or unlucky, and it might be better to create some sort of confidence interval to reflect drivers' performance. Rather than measuring the exact numbers of wins or titles, you could estimate a likely range predicting how many wins/titles they should have based on their results. Obviously there are some seasons that might be title seasons in other years but not in that one, etc... And then when you consider that these are really team championships anyway and don't really differentiate between the team and the driver, that makes it even more complicated. I care somewhat more about overall careers than arbitrary cross-sections, because even a cross-section of 36 races will not be enough to nullify the luck (especially when fewer and fewer races within those 36 races are more important than the rest...)
There was a great passage in the Stefan Fatsis Scrabble book "Word Freak" quoting the now-retired player Jim Geary about how arbitrary it can be to do entire judgments on small sample sizes just because they happen to be consecutive:
Does [winning the 2000 National Scrabble Championship] make [Joe] Edley the best Scrabble player of all time? Does it mean that luck played no role in his third crown? Mike Baron, the Edley detractor and [Brian] Cappelletto booster, later points out that, as the top seed, Brian played the toughest field statistically in the first eleven games of the tourney, which were a round robin; Edley had an easier go. Jim Geary, who finished eighteenth, praises Edley's achievement; Jim is one top player who truly doesn't resent Joe's success. But he also cites a Scrabble truism: In the strongest overall field in the world, the winner needs to be damn good and damn lucky. In one four-round stretch, Geary notes, Edley posted the tournament's high-scoring game three times.
"Does this make him some kind of supergenius?" Geary writes to me afterward. "No, Scrabble doesn't work that way. You have to play well, of course . . . but by and large those 550-point games are born of having things go really, really well for one game. Additionally, in those games, things are going pretty shitty for your opponent. The other thing to note is those games are remarkably easy on the system. And [for Edley] they were between Rounds 21 and 24. What fortune!
"In the long run," Geary says of luck, "it's going to balance out, but thirty-one games isn't the long run. With ten other fantastic players in the field, you can't win the tourney with balanced luck. And you really can't with bad luck.
I'm DEFINITELY NOT saying that Edley isn't a star, but I do say that people overstate the significance of small strings of statistical events based on their grouping. Granted this is the case in many, many competitive endeavors, but that doesn't mean that Joe Edley is the best player or that he was even the best player that week.
I understand that that's just the way the game goes. If lightning should strike and I win the World Scrabble Championship, I won't kid myself too much about what it means.
But I'll be happy."
A much better way of thinking about probability I think, and I really like the "small strings of statistical events based on their grouping" phrase. Probably my second favorite quote from this book.
If you chose to take 36 consecutive races from the middle of one season to the middle of the next (or at various other arbitrary points), you'd probably shake lots of championships up.
While I do like looking at stuff like peak seasons and stuff, I guess it doesn't matter to me as much as the entire career. But I don't think luck necessarily evens out in NASCAR like Geary says it does in Scrabble, because oftentimes people don't stay with one team long enough for the luck to even out. Say somebody who only gets two or three years in fast cars and is unlucky in them, or an injury after an unlucky previous career like we saw with Park, Nadeau, and now Wickens...
It's probably more complicated than people are making it. That doesn't mean championships have no value, even present day ones, and if I ever release that book ranking the top 1000 auto racers in history, I know I'm picking the 2011 finale for Tony Stewart's best race. But I think championships have less value than most people ascribe to them, even the pre-chase ones.
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sean
Assistant Moderator
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Post by sean on Oct 12, 2018 22:01:01 GMT -5
Championships don't mean shit unless the best driver of the year wins it. Therefore I will continue to dissect and discard chase titles as I please, or I will just straight up ignore them when comparing drivers. Change that to best team and I might be willing to agree with it. The best driver when adjusting for equipment may not often be part of the best driver/team combination.
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Post by JSPorts on Oct 13, 2018 8:42:24 GMT -5
The whole debate about who would've/should've won every championship during the chase era is so dumb. You don't have to like the chase but every driver knows the rules at the beginning of the season and they're racing to win the championship under the current points format, not one from years or even decades ago. Nobody "should have" any more or less championships than they do just because they scored the most points under different rules. Now obviously there's exceptions to this (like William Byron in the truck series a few years ago losing the championship because of something completely out of his control) but if we're just talking about a case where one driver was dominant for most of the season but someone else got hot at the right time and beat them straight up (which is pretty much every year from 2004-2013 where the regular season champion was different from the actual champion), then don't blame the chase, blame the guy who choked. Sauter did out-point Byron by 3 points that year over the full season, so I wouldn't say his title that year was completely undeserved. But his 2017 was better than his 2016, and his 2018 has been better than his 2017.
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Post by pokemon2112 on Oct 15, 2018 5:46:53 GMT -5
Championships don't mean shit unless the best driver of the year wins it. Therefore I will continue to dissect and discard chase titles as I please, or I will just straight up ignore them when comparing drivers. Change that to best team and I might be willing to agree with it. The best driver when adjusting for equipment may not often be part of the best driver/team combination. For me the driver who I think is the most deserving isn't always the one who outperformed equipment most. For example, in terms of outperforming equipment, Alan Kulwicki did the best in 1992, but I think that Davey Allison would've been the most deserving champion.
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Post by JSPorts on Oct 15, 2018 6:09:30 GMT -5
Those 3 were all so close that year, but Allison probably had the best all-around season. However, you don't win titles when you crash that much.
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sean
Assistant Moderator
Posts: 29
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Post by sean on Oct 15, 2018 9:39:36 GMT -5
Change that to best team and I might be willing to agree with it. The best driver when adjusting for equipment may not often be part of the best driver/team combination. For me the driver who I think is the most deserving isn't always the one who outperformed equipment most. For example, in terms of outperforming equipment, Alan Kulwicki did the best in 1992, but I think that Davey Allison would've been the most deserving champion. Oh, of course the title shouldn't automatically go to who outperformed their equipment the most. I just don't really agree with Maverick saying champions are only legitimate if they're the best driver over a season. Bobby Labonte and Damon Hill and Jenson Button and Jimmy Vasser were legitimate champions even if they were never the best drivers in a season. (Although admittedly I'm not sure who I'd take over BL when adjusting for equipment. Maybe Jeff Burton; that wasn't a very good year for Roush. Definitely nobody as clearly outperformed BL as Schumacher, Vettel, and Andretti outperformed the other three IMO.)
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Post by Canadianfan on Oct 15, 2018 17:51:37 GMT -5
Hi
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