Dr. Diandra: Road courses aren’t shortcuts to playoffs for underdog drivers

Eleven winners in the first 15 races have raised hopes that 2022 could be the season in which the NASCAR Cup Series has 16 (or more) winners. Two superspeedway races — the most likely track type for underdog wins — remain on the regular-season schedule.

Four road course races also stand between drivers and the playoffs. Could drivers who may not be able to point themselves into the playoffs earn a bracket slot via a road course win?

NASCAR has run one race at Sonoma every year since 1989. The lone exception is 2020, when COVID forced NASCAR to skip the northern California track. That gives us 32 races in the dataset.

In looking for a simple way to graphically compare driver wins, I discovered treemaps. I think they’re clearer than bar charts for this purpose.

In the treemap below, the area of each rectangle is proportional to the driver’s number of wins. No number next to the name means that the driver won only one race.

The biggest boxes correspond to familiar names. Jeff Gordon leads Sonoma wins with five. He’s followed by Tony Stewart and Martin Truex, Jr. with three each.

One way to define Sonoma underdogs is drivers ranked outside the top 15 coming into the race. Only four drivers in our dataset satisfy that criterion.

The last two cases are pretty exceptional. Busch went on to win the championship in 2015, and Stewart finished 15th in 2016. If we eliminate those two races, we’re left with drivers outside the top 15 winning only 6.7% of Sonoma races.

The two remaining drivers — Gordon and Montoya — were road course specialists. Of Gordon’s three career NASCAR Cup Series wins, two came at road courses. Montoya’s two career wins both came at road courses.

Looking at the remaining 28 wins earned by drivers ranked P15