Winning an individual race is an absolutely awesome and unforgettable experience. Your adrenaline is pumping, you drove great, made smart decisions on track and probably also got a little lucky, too. You are a winner, baby!

Now, winning a single race is one thing, but winning a season-long championship, well, that is a whole different animal. Championships take much more effort, more resources and more hard work. You need to attend a minimum number of events, you need to score well in most of them, you need to keep your car running, repair damage, and tow to tracks far from your house. Luck, also needs to be your passenger if at all possible.

And, this is a very important detail here, you need to keep track of the points.

One of the first NASA regional championships I chased was during the old Performance Touring days, where I ran a 1991 Nissan Sentra SE-R in the PTF class with NASA NorCal. Tracking my points during the year helped me decide which events I needed to attend and which events I needed to finish on the podium to win a trophy during my rookie NASA season.

Championships are won based on points. Whether it is Max Verstappen in Formula 1 or you running Spec Iron in the NASA Great Lakes Region, points are what add up to determine a regional champion at the end of the season. Knowing that, it is crucial that you track your points and that you understand how those points are tallied and what events are counted. This is where reading the NASA CCR is crucial.

Using Microsoft Excel — and basic knowledge picked up from a community college class I took in the mid-90s — I track every competitor at every event during a championship season.

One of the important things to know from the CCR and your region’s rules is how many events are dropped from a championship season. You have to plan your year in advance. If there is a race you cannot make — the track is too far away, your brother is getting married, or your wife will divorce you if you go to one more race — then you will earn zero points during that event. It is nice that NASA allows for flexibility during a calendar, but if you miss that event, dropping your zero non-attended points for the race, then for the rest of your season you need to have solid finishes every race, no DNFs, no DQs for being under weight or over horsepower, no crashes and no mechanical failures — or technical infractions, which cannot be dropped.

Racing in the Honda Challenge series required careful calculations to ensure we were on the right track to win a regional championship in the H4 class.

Another thing to understand is how points are tabulated. It is important to note that first place gets a nice bump for winning, 100 points, which is 10 points over second place (90 points), who only earns 5 points over third place (85 points). And the real kicker on points is how finishers back of the field earn points. You don’t automatically get fourth place points (80 points) in a field of four cars if you go out, make two laps and then have a mechanical problem. The CCR states, any driver who does not finish 50 percent of the laps of the winning driver will earn only half of the points of the last place car who finished 50 percent of the laps. That means your fourth place finish won’t be worth 80 points, but 42.5 points (half of third places 85 points).

Excel will do all the math for you, simply entering “=SUM(E5:N5)” will add all of the values in cells E5, F5, G5, H5, I5, J5, K5, L5, M5, and N5. To drop one of the scores from that total (the lowest score from the season) type in “=P5-J5” to get your sum with a dropped race (if P5 was the race with the lowest points).

Knowing how the points are counted can help you strategize what is important during a race weekend. For example, if you were running near the back of the field and you get a flat near the middle of the race, don’t throw in the towel if you are chasing a championship. It is worth quickly replacing the tire and ensuring you finish within 50 percent of the laps of the winner so you can get as many point as possible during the race. Knowing this, even during a sprint race, I had crew on the pit wall with a jack, electric impact wrench, a spare tire and a huge crow bar to peel a fender off of a damaged tire.

During the Western Endurance Racing Championship, which includes the NASA 25 Hours of Thunderhill, we painstakingly tracked our season-long points as we raced long hours often into the night at tracks up and down the West Coast trying to win an endurance racing championship.

Understanding how every point counts, you can see why knowing the rules and tracking how you are doing during the season against your competitors can be beneficial to your season-long strategy to becoming a champion. Many regions track the points for you on their websites, but sometimes the points are a little behind and sometimes there are human errors in the tabulation. By tracking your own points using an Excel spreadsheet you can verify the region’s points, see where you need to improve, or what events you need to attend and do well in, and also you can populate fields to predict how an upcoming race result would affect your championship chase. What happens in the next race if you finish fourth and the team who is behind you in the points finishes first?

Math is the answer to the game. A lot of spreadsheet strategy, along with consistent finishes, helped earn Keith Kramer and I some very large NASA WERC Championship trophies.

By predicting the outcome of a race can help you to make smarter decisions on track. Do you need to win the last race of the year? Or can you finish in third place and still win the championship? The risks needed to win a sprint race versus following the leaders and ensuring a third-place finish are vastly different. If you go for the win, make a mistake on track, or are just in an unlucky space on the exit of a corner and you are taken out, you may lose an entire championship in a single corner. Knowing how the points are looking as you go into that final race helps you know you don’t need to take those extra risks. Tell your ego to chill, back off and be a champion.

Even during a one-week event, like the NASA sanctioned One Lap of America, we used our own spreadsheet to track our points, to help us strategize where we needed to finish during the last few events to ensure we secured an Economy Car class victory in the race.

What is great about Excel is how powerful a program it is, while also pretty easy to use. A simple Google or YouTube search will teach you the basic things you need to type into a cell in order for the spreadsheet to add columns up and then re-order the rows based on points leaders. Admittedly, I am a complete spreadsheet nerd and love to tinker with the points. I e-mail the spreadsheet to my teammates and crew — who rarely open the attachment — and then pepper them with questions later. We chat about possible outcomes and adjust our strategy accordingly. Should we use an old set of tires or should we get our wallets out and get a sticker set for the next weekend?

Knowledge is the greatest weapon. By intimately knowing your own season-long points, as well as your competitor’s season-long points, this information can help you to create a championship winning season strategy.

The key to playing with Excel is the ability to manipulate the spreadsheet to forecast the future of the season. This is something you can’t do by looking at your Region’s website which tracks the points for you. If you can learn the following coding “=SUM (E5:N5)” which adds everything from column E to column N on row 5, then you can use Excel like anybody else and start tracking your own points.

After all the math, hard work, late night shop thrashes and solid finishes, if everything works out like your trusty spreadsheet calculated that it will, then you will be enjoying the sweet taste of champagne. Congratulations!

I’ve been playing with Excel as long as I have been playing with cars and that combination of driving fast and tracking my points like a nerd on Excel has earned me 13 championships. And, because I’m a statistics dork, I still have all of the old spreadsheets on my hard drive for every single season.

 

Rob Krider is a four-time NASA Honda Challenge 4 National Champion, the author of the memoir, “Cadet Blues,” and is the host of the “Stories and Cocktails” podcast.

Images courtesy of Rob Krider and Stephen Burke

3 COMMENTS

  1. I’ve looked in the rules but can’t find the section that says you only get half points for finishing less than 50% of the race laps. Could you provide the reference? Thank you

  2. There is a better way. Excel will do the drops for you. In the formula below, one competitor’s points are in a single row from column D through column S and the region allows 3 drops. Note that this will still drop a non-droppable DQ “0” so you’ll have to account for that manually.

    =SUM(D4:S4,-SMALL(D4:S4,{1,2,3}))

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