Dr. Diandra: The cars each playoff driver should avoid to survive Bristol

With only Christopher Bell locked into the next round of the playoffs, the first item on every other drivers’ to-do list is to simply survive Bristol.

The worst thing that can happen to a playoff driver is him taking himself out of the race.

The second-worst thing is for another driver take him out.

During a discussion of accidents on SiriusXM Speedway, host Dave Moody asked if some drivers tend to run into each other more than they run into other drivers.

I suspected they did, but here are the numbers.

Never trust statistics unless you know what data was used, where it came from, and how the claimant arrived at their results.

I started with NASCAR’s caution list, selecting all accidents and spins involving two or more cars. For 2022, that totaled 69 incidents involving 280 cars.

Incidents at road courses, however, often don’t cause cautions. Therefore, I added the list of incidents I compiled from analyzing video of the five road course races. That provided 20 more incidents involving 48 cars.

I then identified all the pairwise correlations. That’s a fancy way of saying I found all the pairs of drivers who were in the same accidents.

For Ross Chastain, for example, I counted how many times the No. 1 car was in an accident that also involved the No. 2 car, the No. 3 car, etc. I repeated this for each driver.

Each pair of drivers’ score is the number of accidents they had in common. These numbers ranged from zero to six.

No analysis is ever absolute. So here are the caveats:

I start by examining how many pairwise collisions each driver tallied in the 28 races this year. Again, a pairwise collision is simply an accident or spin involving both drivers.

Two of this year’s rookie class rise to the top of the list. Harrison