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. Drag racing simply had no stats like "how left-handed batters fared against guys named Jim on Tuesdays in August when the temperature was 65 degrees."

But 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 Brian Lohnes and I have been doing this offseason (like this one).

Here's the fourth and final review of the final 2024 stats in the Pro classes, focusing on a few of the vital stats that help explain how the year went in Pro Stock Motorcycle.

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 Pro Stock Motorcycle, that's runs quicker than 7.000 seconds and faster than 193 mph. This is a measure of crew chief success.

PRO STOCK MOTORCYCLE: REACTION-TIME AVERAGE LEADERS (countdown riders only)

Observations: The top three holeshot artists were separated by just 007-second, but look at Chris Bostick in there as the third-best leaver. That's not something he's generally credited with, and he only did it in 15 launches, half of what the others had, and you could argue that was fewer to mess up but also fewer to improve upon, but it's still impressive. Unfortunately, the last 1,319 feet of the run were not as good. It is interesting that the bottom third of this list has three of the four Matt Smith Racing riders, and how much harder it might be to cut a light on a V-Twin instead of a Suzuki, though similarly equipped John Hall was more than a hundredth better than Matt and two-hundredths better than Angie. 

PRO STOCK MOTORCYCLE: LEAVING FIRST LEADERS

Observations: Even though world champ Gaige Herrera didn't have the best reaction-time average, he did have a healthy class-leading "left first" margin on nearly three-fourths of his opponents, whereas reaction-time king Chase Van Sant left on just over half of his foes. Does that mean people tried harder against Van Sant? Maybe so. Van Sant's hair-trigger cut both ways as he also was among the leaders in red-light starts but, to be fair, three of his four fouls came in the season's first five races and just one in the remaining 10 events. And, again, due to their quick-launching nature, red-lights are an expected part of the business; everyone on this Top 10 list had at least one.

PRO STOCK MOTORCYCLE: SPEED INDEX

Observations: I have to admit I was stunned to see Matt Smith's name atop this list because, historically, it seems like he'd gotten a bit a of rap of being spread too thin tuning four bikes and you'd see weird breakage. I remember one year at Gainesville he started the bike and a rag apparently had accidentally been left in or on the engine and came out the other end all shredded. But the fact that he only had four aborted runs out of nearly 100 is super impressive. Maybe the fact that some of them were high-profile (for example, the bike wouldn't start in the semi's in Seattle), but clearly, this was a false narrative.

Combo rankings

Observations: Van Sant had the best average of these four key stats, but the one that let him down a bit was average race-day e.t., as his 6.836 average cost him against the 6.808 and 6.817 averages of Herrera and Matt Smith, respectively, part of the reason for his sixth-place finish. Herrera was top four across the board, and you can see how Matt's Smith's starting-line stats undercut his full-run percentage and second-best e.t. This is also where you see Bostick's lightning leaves toppled by the rest of the run, where he finished just 57% of runs under power, and his race-day average (7.38) with so many shutoffs is not even in the Top 10.

And here are the leaders in some other important categories:

Previously:
2024 Top Fuel stats
2024 Funny Car stats
2024 Pro Stock stats