Dr. Diandra: NASCAR Cup Series cautions on the rise

We’re one-third of the way into the NASCAR Cup Series season, and we’ve run every type of track we’ll visit this year. Twelve races in also means we’ve accumulated enough data to start examining trends.

The trend that caught my eye is the high number of cautions in 2022. I show them below, by race and type.

We’ve had a total of 110 cautions in 12 races. Twenty-five of those cautions are competition or stage-end cautions, which leaves us with 85 unplanned or ‘natural’ cautions. That’s significantly higher than last year’s 59 natural cautions after 12 races.

To be fair, we’ve run one more superspeedway this year than last year at this time. Atlanta contributed an average of five cautions in the last five races. This year, it had 11. But that’s only six more cautions. And Martinsville was eight cautions below its five-year average in 2022.

We’ve had 10 more accidents this year (49) than there were last year at this time.

Even more interesting: We’ve had 19 spins in 12 races, which is only one less than in the entire 2021 season. We’ll likely surpass last season’s spin total in the next race or two.

Last year, we had no stalls in the first 12 races. This year, we’ve got seven. We’ve also got three more debris cautions than last year at this time.

The biggest new variable this year is, of course, the Next Gen car. The higher caution numbers may reflect a learning curve. Or, the Next Gen car might be that much harder to driver than the Gen-6 model. If the former is the case, the caution rate should slow down as the season progresses. If the trends of the first third of the season continue, we’re looking at a possible 255 total natural cautions for the 2011 season — compared to 172 last year.

A note about how NASCAR records