Dr. Diandra: Best drivers of the season often win the All-Star Race

The format and the venue have changed over the years, but the NASCAR All-Star Race remains a welcome chance for drivers to cut loose. There’s nothing on the line but the trophy and the purse.

That’s slightly less true this year. With Texas Motor Speedway hosting only one points race — the kickoff for the Round of 12 — the All-Star race weekend is teams’ only opportunity to gather data on the NextGen car’s performance at this track.

“You can certainly look at it for a lot of things,” Austin Cindric told NBC Sports. “It’s an opportunity to win a million dollars. That’s pretty cool for a 23-year-old. At the same time, you can easily use it as a practice session in many facets… I think Texas has kind of defined itself as its own beast, depending on what they do with track prep.”

But even with that caveat, most drivers won’t be able to avoid the ‘checkers-or-wreckers’ mentality.

Twenty-five drivers have won one or more of the 37 All-Star Races run to date.

The list of All-Star Race winners reads like a who’s who of NASCAR. Let’s examine how drivers did during the season in which they won the All-Star Race.

I tallied end-of-year driver standings for All-Star-Race winners. The pie chart below shows the percentage of drivers ending the season in each position. The chart begins at 12 o’clock and goes counter clockwise.

Some highlights:

The All-Star race usually happens the week before Memorial Day weekend. The exceptions were in 1986 (Atlanta, on Mother’s Day) and in 2019 and 2020, when COVID shifted the race to mid-July and mid-June, respectively. But most years, the All-Star Race comes at the perfect point to evaluate which drivers are on track to meet their goals and which one are lagging behind.

I tallied how many races each