Grading our NASCAR preseason questions: See who won the 2023 edition

The Athletic

01 January 0001

Grading our NASCAR preseason questions: See who won the 2023 edition

Somehow, after nearly 600 entries — more than double the previous record total — our annual NASCAR Preseason Questions Championship ended in a four-way tie. It seems someone — who shall remain nameless but whose initials are J.G. and might be writing this post — forgot to implement a just-in-case tiebreaker for this season’s contest.

Oops! Well, call it our version of a Championship 4. Congratulations to Brad Beasley, Will Purbaugh, Lisa Chanana and Gabe Horwitz, who each got an astounding four of the five questions correct.

In 2022, 69 percent of respondents failed to get even one correct response. We thought these questions were tough. But this year, only 14 percent didn’t get on the board with at least one right answer (I got two out of five, for the record).

Let’s take a look back at the questions and see where most of us (other than the Championship 4) went wrong.

1. Who has a better season: Kyle Busch or Tyler Reddick?

To judge this, the criteria were listed thusly: Which of those drivers will have the head-to-head edge in five major categories (wins, top-fives, top-10s, laps led and average finish) during the first year with their new teams?

This was a squeaker because Busch and Reddick ended up with similar seasons. Busch had one more win, one more top-10 and a better average finish by 0.7 position(s). They tied on top-fives, and Reddick led more laps.

Reddick finished sixth in points, and Busch was 14th, but playoff performance was not part of the preseason question criteria. So under this definition, Busch picks up a 3-1 victory.

A slight majority of our respondents (57.8 percent) went with Reddick, but the 42.2 percent who had Busch picked up 1 point for their efforts (including all of our Championship 4).

2. How does Kevin Harvick fare in his final year?

This one asked for a prediction on how far Harvick would advance in the playoffs: Championship 4, Round of 8, Round of 12, Round of 16 or miss it entirely. The correct answer — Round of 16 — was selected by 18.6 percent of players, which trailed Round of 12 (39 percent) and Round of 8 (29.1 percent).

Though it was disappointing for Harvick to get eliminated so early and fail to win a race in his final season, three of our four finalists saw this coming: Purbaugh, Chanana and Horwitz. Beasley thought Harvick would make it to the Round of 8, which was reasonable, but he made up for the miss on the next answer.

3. Who will drive the No. 4 car in 2024?

This one got a fascinating variety of answers, many of which didn’t age well. Get this: The correct choice, Josh Berry, was only the seventh-most-picked driver (3.5 percent).

Who was ahead of him? Cole Custer (14.1 percent) and Zane Smith (14 percent) led the way, though Custer ended up staying in the Xfinity Series for another year after winning the title and Smith signed with Trackhouse (and will run for Spire as part of a partnership next season).

Current Stewart-Haas Racing driver Ryan Preece was next with 11.3 percent, as those guessers figured he might slide over from the No. 41 car to take the No. 4 seat. After that, it was Erik Jones (11.1 percent), Alex Bowman (6.3 percent), Riley Herbst (5.1 percent) and Ross Chastain (4.4 percent).

Bowman and Chastain announced contract extensions in February that took them off the market, Herbst stayed with SHR in Xfinity and Jones is continuing to build with Legacy Motor Club.

As teased in the previous answer, Beasley was one of the few who nailed the Berry prediction. Purbaugh and Chanana went with Smith, and Horwitz said Jones.

4. Will parity persist?

Coming off a 2022 season that saw a record-tying 19 winners, the big question was whether we’d see a return to the norm in Year 2 of the Next Gen car. Would the top teams dominate again, or would we still see some surprises pop up?

The answer was somewhere in the middle (hello, Shane van Gisbergen!): 15 drivers won a race, which was down from the final season before Next Gen (16 winners in 2021) but up from 2020 (13).

Most people were in the ballpark on this one. The top answer was 14 (22 percent), but 15 wasn’t far behind (19 percent). Half credit was given to anyone who guessed on either side of the correct number, and 1 point was awarded to those who got it exactly right, which included all of our Championship 4 players.

5. Who is a lock for the Championship 4?

This has become one of the mainstay questions in the predictions contest, and it seems so easy: Just name a single driver who you think will make the final four. That’s it!

And yet it seems so challenging for so many people. Chase Elliott, for example, was the No. 1 pick this season with 35 percent of the vote, and he didn’t even win a race all year.

The No. 2 pick, Kyle Larson, made the Championship 4, and the 26 percent who selected him included three of our finalists (Beasley, Purbaugh and Chanana).

Defending champion Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin were the next-most-selected drivers, though both missed the cut. You have to go further down the list to find the 4.4 percent of people who selected eventual champion Ryan Blaney (a group that included Horwitz).

After that, a tiny fraction of players were bold enough to think Christopher Bell (1.2 percent) would make it. Oh, and William Byron? He didn’t even get a half-percent of the vote; only three people out of the nearly 600 in the game had Byron as their Championship 4 lock (Byron only went on to basically be the Driver of the Year by leading the series in wins, top-fives, top-10s and average finish).

It’s just another reminder: You might think NASCAR is predictable at times, but reflecting on the preseason questions shows just how uncertain the outcomes can be. Unless you’re Beasley, Purbaugh, Chanana and Horwitz, of course.