It’s no secret that NASCAR’s had a rough go of it in recent years when it comes to weather.
It seems like every big swing event — from the Chicago Street Race and The Clash at The Coliseum to the Bristol Dirt Race — has been marred by heavy rain and last-minute schedule changes. The 2023 NASCAR season had the most weather-affected races on record, and NASCAR is on pace to set a new high water mark in 2024. On the heels of a chaotic opening weekend in Los Angeles that saw an incoming deluge force the series move a race up on the calendar for the first time in its history, NASCAR has already had to postpone two events at Daytona .
Once renowned for wielding the power of Vortex Theory to help ward off incoming rain cells, NASCAR’s touring series have come to be seen as a drought-buster.
But is there any truth behind the memes? Does it actually rain more when NASCAR is in town? Well, I decided to take a look.
Using historical precipitation data aggregated on weatherspark.com, I looked at every national touring series race NASCAR has held since the start of the 2021 season. For each race, I recorded rainfall on the originally scheduled race day as well as the week before and after. Since these bracketing control dates will be subject to similar seasonality effects as race day, this approach allows me to mitigate bias from seasonal weather patterns and focus solely on the “effect” of NASCAR itself.
Surprisingly enough, there does appear to be a notable increase in rainfall on race day. Race fans haven’t just been imagining it, after all!
Over the past few years, the average rainfall on scheduled race days is 0.086″. This is over 45% higher than the 0.059″ average rainfall observed during the control dates.
Now, NASCAR obviously doesn’t control the weather, but this is a spectacular run of bad luck. You’re bound to have weather issues from time to time, but based on a paired t-test, you’d expect to see a split this dramatic occur less than 20% of the time.
On the bright side, NASCAR’s weather luck has to revert to the mean eventually… Right?
Photo Credit: Patrick Vallely
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