It seems like all the talk is about how bad Ford is performing in NASCAR. Or conversely, how well Chevrolet is performing.
Would someone explain it to me? Tell me where my logic is going wrong. I don’t see that Ford is PERFORMING any worse or better than you would expect based on the number of Ford’s in any given race.
Let’s look at it like one of the math story problems from school.
Q1: Darren is 1 runner of 10 total runners in Saturday’s marathon. What is his chance of winning the race?
A1: Darren has a 10% chance of winning the race. (1 in 10)
Q2: Darren and the 9 other runners will race 10 marathons this summer. How many races is it logical to say Darren will win?
A2: Darren will win 1 marathon. (All things being equal, each of the 10 runners should be able to win 1 of the 10 marathons)
What if Darren wins no races? What if he won 3 races? Then you could say he PERFORMED better or worse than expected.
Is this bad logic?
Now the NASCAR example among the 3 manufacturers.
Taking a sample of 3 races from the 2006 season, each won by a different manufacturer. Coca-Cola 600 (Kahne/Dodge), Pennsylvania 500 (Hamlin/Chevrolet) and the Ford 400 (Biffle/Ford).
Each of these 3 races had about the same distribution of manufacturers cars each time: Chevrolet’s 50%; Dodge 32%; Ford 18%.
All things being equal, shouldn’t that representation also equal the percentage of races won by each manufacturer?
In the 2006 NASCAR season: Chevrolet’s won 23 races (64%); Dodge’s won 7 races (19%); Ford’s won 6 races (17%).
Doesn’t it look like Chevrolet did better than should be expected? Ford did (almost) as good as expected? Dodge did worse than expected?
So why is Ford getting all this flak for ‘Performing so poorly in NASCAR?’ Seems more like the kick ‘em while their down and keep ‘em down method of business since Ford posted their worst loss ever this last quarter.
I’ll give you that the number of Ford’s racing is much less than 10 years ago. In fact Ford and Chevrolet have flip flopped in their number of entries. But, it doesn’t seem so much a matter of Ford being a worse performing car as it does a poor job of encouraging/supporting any team besides Roush to field their cars.
I’m wondering where the Dodge hate is? They are the ones that let Chevrolet win 5 more races than they should have. Oh yeah, how many races did Kasey Kahne crash on the final lap…?”