NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

Compared to stick and ball sports, motorsports stats have traditionally been very limited due to the nature of competition. For years, drag racing statskeepers would track wins and losses and average time, elapsed time, and speed averages, but that was about it.

For the last several years, Pete Richards and the NHRA Nitro Research Dept. have been meticulously recording and organizing a vast array of stats that help better tell the story of a racer’s season or even help us better understand how the results of classes as a whole play out and allow us to track various trends. His season-ending report spanned a whopping 191 pages and covered some pretty great stats that we and the NHRA on FOX team use on a regular basis to add some depth and detail to our reporting. You've already seen some of them in stories that Bian Lohnes and I have been doing this offseason.

Here's the first of four reviews of the final 2024 stats in the Pro classes, focusing on a few of the vital stats that help explain how the year went.

AVERAGE REACTION TIME

Ever since reaction times became an official NHRA stat in 1981, it has been one of the most interesting yet frustrating stats to track. Drivers either love 'em or loathe 'em for what they show/don't show, while crew chiefs seem to largely dislike them, especially when their driver tries to pad their stats because reaction time is affected by many factors, including (but not limited to) how deeply the driver rolls into the staging beams, the individual track's rollout length, and the car's tune-up.

LEAVING FIRST

Regardless of your reaction time, a driver's job, at minimum, is to leave ahead of his or her opponent. Of course, the greater the advantage, the better your chances of winning, but it all starts with that initial move. This stat pack also includes holeshot wins and losses and red-light starts.

SPEED INDEX

This is a measure of runs completed in both qualifying and eliminations, under full or near-full throttle. For Top Fuel, that's runs quicker than 4.100 and faster than 300 mph. This is a measure of crew chief success.

FUNNY CAR: REACTION-TIME AVERAGE LEADERS

Observations: The season-long category average reaction time was .081, which shows you how great J.R. Todd and Austin Prock were than not just that number but the rest of the top 12. Now a hundredth of a second between Todd and third-place Matt Hagan might not seem like a lot, but there were plenty of races decided by that margin. Also worth noting that Prock's remained close to Todd despite having nearly half again (65 to 43) as many leaves to potentially have a stinker or two. One also has to wonder if guys like Dave Richards and Buddy Hull would have been better with more elimination-day laps to hone their reactions.

Funny Car: leaving first leaders

Observations: Again, Todd's starting-line skills are evident regardless of the opponent as he left on nearly three-fourths of his opponents, and four times that paid off with holeshot wins. While Prock again was on his heels, four losses by holeshot is a bit of a tribute to his tuning father, Jimmy, who gave him a winning hot rod for more than just the 53 rounds he did win, but you also have to look at it another way: Drivers he faced knew that they had to take their shot against him if they wanted to have any chance to win against his better-performing car, and more than two-thirds of the time, they weren't able to. This box the R.T. average above shows that maybe we haven't been giving all the kudos to Hagan that we should have. He was third in both starting-line matrixes and had a class-high five holeshot wins.

Funny Car: Speed Index (wide-Open Throttle Runs)

Observations: Interesting dynamic here as John Force ran the first nine races of the season in the Peak Camaro and Jack Beckman the last eight following Force's June accident, so we combined the body of work, and the Peak team's car made it down the track more regularly than their championship teammate Prock. Oddly, Beckman and Force made the exact same number of runs, and Beckman only got it downtrack three more times than Force, showing that the team had a handle on the car regardless of who was driving. Again, as it was with reaction-time average, Prock's crew had a lot more chances to not make it down the track (138 to 106), so the sample size is not quite the same but the drop-off to Hagan's next-best average is staggering (79 to 63%).

Combo rankings

When you combine the three stats above (reaction time, left first, and wide-open throttle runs) and then add in the key component of average race-day eliminations e.t., it paints a very curious picture (drivers are presented in their points-finishing order):

Observations: Austin Prock shows that you don't need to lead any category to win the championship, but when you're No. 2 in all of them, that's a pretty good path to success. You'd think that the Prock Rocket would have had the quickest average elapsed time, but he did not. In his nine-race season, that occurred mostly in cooler climes. Force averaged 4.018, while Prock's season-long average was 4.075. Paul Lee is the obvious outlier here as he did not qualify for the Countdown and ended up 13th in points with an overall package that, had he run a whole season and been able to move up in the standings in the Countdown, his position could have been mid-Top 10.

And here are the leaders in some other important categories:

Next up: Pro Stock