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 third 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 stat 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, that's runs quicker than 6.700 and faster than 205 mph. This is a measure of crew chief success.

PRO STOCK: REACTION-TIME AVERAGE LEADERS

Observations: How tough is the Pro Stock starting line? You just need to look at these stats to see the top four leavers with .002-second and the top eight just a hundredth apart. Kudo to Fernando Cuadra Jr. for making this list; he obviously did not have the car to go with his great leaves (averaging just a 6.71 race-day e.t.) or he could have been trouble. And look at Jeg Coughlin Jr., still doing his thing year after year despite now being one of the elder statesmen in the class.

PRO STOCK: LEAVING FIRST LEADERS

Observations: Aaron Stanfield and Dallas Glenn show here that they're not only quick but consistently able to leave ahead of most (three-quarters) of the people they race and how both of them scored eight holeshot wins against zero foul starts. That's impressive. This is where we start to see the chink in six-time world champ Erica Enders' armor as she was left on nearly two-thirds of the time with a class-leading nine holeshot losses. As we've said in earlier columns, that stat is about 180 degrees from what we're used to from Double-E. And, not to just pile it on E.E., but Greg Anderson had six holeshot losses against zero holeshot wins.

PRO STOCK: SPEED INDEX

Observations: Here's where Anderson's HendrickCars.com really shined, with just nine aborted runs all season. True, Pro Stock cars have become finely-tuned rocketships, but we saw plenty of tire shake throughout the category all year. Enders also made a lot of full pulls, but her reaction times and sixth-quickest e.t. average didn't help.

Combo rankings

Observations: When we looked at Funny Car champ Austin prock's combo stats, he was top three or better across all four of these stats, while Anderson is not, but the two that he did lead — average race-day e.t. and full-throttle percentage — are two key metrics to a championship. Stanfield and Glenn had a much better average finish across the categories except the one that matters most: average elapsed time. Coughin also was respectable across three of the four stats but not that last one. (NR rankings above mean a driver did not finish in the top 15 of that stat.)

And here are the leaders in some other important categories:

Previously:

2024 Top Fuel stats
2024 Funny Car stats