2022

The theme of the 2022 NASCAR Cup season in a nutshell: parity.

After Kyle Larson put together one of the most dominant campaigns in NASCAR’s modern era in 2021, and with the introduction of the Gen 7 car as well as the return of full race weekends with practice and qualifying, it was safe to say we were due for a regression to the mean. But I don’t think anybody could have possibly expected the results we ended up getting, which is to say the most competitive season in twenty years — if not longer.

Let’s throw some numbers out there: Chase Elliott’s series-leading 98.6 Driver Rating is the lowest by a season leader throughout the 18-year history of NASCAR’s loop data, and the first time no drivers scored above 100. His 857 laps led were also the most of anyone in 2022, and it marks the first time since 1960(!) that nobody reached at least 1,000. And in the big box above, Elliott’s TDR score of 147.17 marks by far the lowest of anyone who can ever lay claim to being a season’s best driver. Last year, Larson’s sky high rating of 200.21 cleared the field by nearly 30 points, a gap about as large as that from Elliott this year back to Kevin Harvick in 14th place, and remember all that talk about how “disappointing” Elliott was in 2021, when his title defense fell flat while his teammate went scorched Earth on the field? His score last year of 161.26 was sizably better than the one that led the series this season.

So now that that’s all out of the way, I do think it’s pretty safe to say that Chase Elliott was the overall best driver of 2022. In addition to his overall TDR title, he also led the series in ETDR, TDR top fives, average TDR rank, average finish (for the results fundamentalists out there), ARP, ARP Score, Weighted Percentage Led, and XDW (and of course, though it isn’t a part of the TDR formula, it’s worth mentioning that his season lead in Quality Passes was the fourth of his seven year cup career). But a strong argument can also be made for the season’s actual champion, Joey Logano, who led in ATDR (which more heavily factors in equipment strength), and had more TDR wins than any other driver, with six to Elliott’s four. Meanwhile, closely behind the two of them was Logano’s teammate Ryan Blaney, who despite failing to pick up a race win on the year, was virtually identical with Logano where the metrics are concerned and was arguably the year’s most consistent driver, with his 23 TDR top tens leading the field.

Behind those top three, it gets pretty messy. Kyle Larson’s dud of a title defense, much like Elliott’s a year prior, was still a very solid season that just happened to fail to measure up to expectations, and he had the year’s most dominant performance with his 332.9 TDR score at Homestead. Ross Chastain, meanwhile, was one of the biggest surprises of the year, and skyrocketed from the 18th best rating last season to 5th in 2022, while giving us plenty to remember that can’t necessarily show up on the stat sheet. Denny Hamlin rebounded from a brutally unlucky first half of the year to end up sixth as he led in the majority of the passing stats, notably True Passer Rating (the statistic formerly known as LTPD), while winless teammate Martin Truex, Jr. flew under the radar for a solid seventh. The next several drivers behind them were separated by razor thin margins — Christopher Bell made the championship round of the playoffs at Phoenix along with Elliott, Logano, and Chastain, but the analytics were far less kind to his season as he ranked only eleventh, while Tyler Reddick’s advanced numbers probably don’t do justice to how impressive he was given the unreliability of his RCR equipment, with a number of flat tires and parts failures — often under green — causing him to score much lower than he should have.

Sandwiched between those previously mentioned were Erik Jones, whose breakout year went mostly unnoticed until his surprising win at Darlington, and who took home the accolade of being this year’s biggest overachiever with an Average Running Position more than two spots higher than his team’s Equipment Rating (granted, this is likely inflated due to teammate Ty Dillon influencing that rating in the wrong direction). Kurt Busch was only able to run 20 of the 36 races before a concussion unfortunately sidelined him for the rest of the year, but before that, he was showing few signs of slowing down as his average TDR score ended up being good enough for eighth on the season, surprisingly beating out brother Kyle, who — perhaps due to his lame duck status at Joe Gibbs Racing — had a tumultuous second half of the year and fell all the way to 12th. William Byron similarly struggled after a red hot start (though he did rebound nicely during the playoffs, and was better throughout the season than his lack of top tens would indicate) and fell to 13th, with ageless EARP leader Kevin Harvick and the surprising AJ Allmendinger (granted, in a part-time schedule mostly centered around his best tracks) rounding out the top fifteen. The year also saw a number of other midpack mainstays break out with flashes of high end potential, such as Bubba Wallace, Daniel Suarez, Chase Briscoe, Chris Buescher, and yes, even Michael McDowell, who despite being the season’s most overrated driver results-wise, did sneak into the top 20 in TDR.

There wasn’t much to write home about for the rookies, however, as despite Austin Cindric winning the Daytona 500 and making the second round of the playoffs, his performance lagged well behind his teammates and hurt him dearly in the metrics, as he ended up a below average 27th. Harrison Burton and Todd Gilliland similarly struggled to find their footing (but did show some improvement towards the end of the year), while Ty Gibbs and Noah Gragson also got plenty of run to prepare themselves for full schedules next year, and neither were particularly impressive. Another driver you’ll find way down the TDR list is Austin Dillon, who seemed on the surface to have a solid season by his standards, but as it turns out, this was mostly because he was the luckiest driver in the garage.

It’s safe to say that the discrepancy between performance and results this season was much higher than it’s been in recent years past, and while frustrating at times, it can mainly be chalked up as an unfortunate downside of the wildly improved parity we saw in 2022. Nothing about this year made any sense at all, like some multi-layered action flick where you wait two hours to figure out what’s going on only to realize that the whole point is that you’re not supposed to understand it. With all said and done, I think it’s safe to say we’ll all look back on the 2022 NASCAR Cup Series season as one of the craziest roller coaster rides of our lifetimes, and all things considered, that’s not such a bad tradeoff.