The field prepares for a restart during the South Point 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 2025. Photo: TaurusEmerald / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Denny Hamlin led 292 of the 400 laps at Martinsville on March 29. That is 73 percent of the race. He finished second, 0.565 seconds behind Chase Elliott, who led 84 laps and took the win (NASCAR race recap).
Call it Hamlin’s bad afternoon if you want. Line up nine seasons of NASCAR’s own race data and Martinsville stops looking like an outlier. From 2018 through 2020, the driver with the most laps led in a Cup points race won it 51.9 percent of the time. From 2021 through Phoenix on October 18, 2026, that number is 38.0 percent. The leaders are not leading less. They are converting less of it.
What I measured
The dataset is NASCAR’s public race data feed. Each Cup race has a weekend-feed file with final results, laps led per driver, and caution segments (the 2026 Martinsville file is a good example), and each season has a race list. I pulled every Cup points race from 2018 through 2026, excluding the Clash, Duels and All-Star Race: 36 races a year for 2018–2025 and 33 so far in 2026, for 321 races in all. The feed does not return usable 2017 data in this format, so 2018 is the earliest season.
For each race I took the driver with the most laps led and checked whether he won. Six races had a tie for most laps led; I credited the tied driver who finished best, and dropping those six races entirely moves the era rates only to 51.9 and 37.8 percent. As a data check, per-driver laps led add up to the official race distance in 316 of the 321 races. The other five are off by a single lap, which looks like overtime or rounding.
The numbers, season by season
| Season | Races | Top lap leader won | Win rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 36 | 17 | 47.2% |
| 2019 | 36 | 18 | 50.0% |
| 2020 | 36 | 21 | 58.3% |
| 2021 | 36 | 13 | 36.1% |
| 2022 | 36 | 13 | 36.1% |
| 2023 | 36 | 15 | 41.7% |
| 2024 | 36 | 12 | 33.3% |
| 2025 | 36 | 15 | 41.7% |
| 2026 (through Phoenix) | 33 | 13 | 39.4% |
Break it into two periods and the gap is hard to miss. In 2018–2020 the top lap leader won 56 of 108 races (51.9%). In 2021–2026 he won 81 of 213 (38.0%). A Fisher exact test puts the chance of a gap that large appearing by luck alone, if nothing had changed, at about 2.3 percent, or roughly 1 in 43.
One caution first. I picked 2021 as the break after looking at the yearly numbers, which is the kind of choice that flatters a result. The cleaner split is by car: the Gen-6 seasons (2018–2021) against the Next Gen seasons (2022–2026). That comparison is 47.9 percent (69 of 144) against 38.4 percent (68 of 177), with a p-value near 0.09. It points the same way, but it does not clear the usual bar. Treat this as a flag worth watching, not a verdict.
The truly dominant cars lose too
The effect is not limited to marginal leaders. In races where one driver led at least 40 percent of the laps, he won 39 of 59 (66.1%) in 2018–2020 and 54 of 108 (50.0%) from 2021 on, with a p-value of about 0.05. Since 2021, half the drivers who ran out front for two-fifths of a race did not win it.
Average dominance has barely moved. The top leader’s share of laps averaged 44.9 percent in the first period and 43.0 percent in the second. Leading is just paying off less.
2026 has its own list
This season is in line with its era: 13 wins from 33 top lap leaders (39.4%), inside the 33.3–41.7 percent range of 2021–2025. It still produced seven races where a driver led at least 40 percent of the laps and did not win.
| Race (2026) | Led most laps | Laps led | Finish | Winner (laps led) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phoenix, Mar. 8 | Christopher Bell | 176 of 312 (56%) | 2nd | Ryan Blaney (28) |
| Darlington, Mar. 22 | Brad Keselowski | 142 of 293 (48%) | 2nd | Tyler Reddick (77) |
| Martinsville, Mar. 29 | Denny Hamlin | 292 of 400 (73%) | 2nd | Chase Elliott (84) |
| Bristol, Apr. 12 | Kyle Larson | 284 of 505 (56%) | 3rd | Ty Gibbs (25) |
| Kansas, Apr. 19 | Denny Hamlin | 131 of 274 (48%) | 4th | Tyler Reddick (10) |
| Richmond, Aug. 15 | Chase Briscoe | 171 of 400 (43%) | 2nd | Joey Logano (95) |
| Bristol, Sept. 19 | Ryan Blaney | 202 of 500 (40%) | 33rd (accident) | Joey Logano (93) |
Kansas is the cleanest example: Reddick won after leading 10 of 274 laps, about 3.6 percent. If the trend needs a face, it’s Larson’s. Through Phoenix he has led 1,215 laps, the most in the Cup Series and 13.5 percent of the 8,974 laps raced in the 33 races, and has two wins. He was the top lap leader in four races and won one of them. That is the backdrop for the playoff swing in Larson’s Phoenix tire failure, which cut a 49-point lead to 5.
Where the wins went
Dominant drivers are still finishing near the front. The top lap leader reached the podium in 70 of 108 races (64.8%) in 2018–2020 and 120 of 213 (56.3%) since. The bigger change is at the other end: he was not running at the finish in 4 races (3.7%) in the first period and 16 (7.5%) in the second, which is a doubling. In 2026 Blaney’s Bristol night race, a 33rd-place finish after an accident, is one of those.
Late cautions are the obvious suspect, so I tested them. In races the top leader lost, I checked for a caution that was not a scheduled stage break, starting in the final 15 percent of the race. It showed up in 33 of 52 losses (63.5%) in 2018–2020 and 92 of 132 (69.7%) since. Late cautions are common in both periods, so they cannot explain the change on their own.
What the data can and cannot say
It can say the top lap leader wins a smaller share of Cup races than he did in 2018–2020, and that the share has held in a 33–42 percent band for six straight seasons. It cannot say why. Laps led is a count of who was in front, not a measure of speed, and the feed has no tire ages, restart order or green-flag pace. The car, the tires, stage racing and restart rules are all candidates, and I am not ranking them. NASCAR is still adjusting the car, as Backfire’s look at the push to put pitch back in the Next Gen shows, which is a reason to keep measuring rather than to settle on an explanation.
The sample is also small. Nine seasons and 321 races is enough to see a gap, not enough to pin down a cause, and the 2018–2020 stretch was itself unusually strong for lap leaders (2020 alone was 58.3 percent). It is possible the earlier period was the anomaly.
Why it matters for the run-in
Fans and analysts lean on laps led as a form guide. The record says it is leakier than it used to be: since 2021, a driver who runs out front for 40 percent of a race has won it only half the time. Three races remain, Talladega on October 25, Martinsville on November 1 and the title race at Homestead-Miami on November 8, so treat a leader’s dominance as softer evidence than it looks. Talladega is a pack-racing outlier, and Backfire’s Talladega points-math preview covers what is at stake there.
If someone leads 250 laps at Martinsville on Nov. 1, how much does that change your title pick? And what do you think is eating the leader’s edge: the car, restarts or stage racing? Tell us in the comments.
Sources and method
All figures are my calculations from NASCAR’s public race data: 2026 race list, 2026 Martinsville race file, and the same URL pattern for every other season and race ID (for example the 2018 race list). Series: NASCAR Cup Series points races. Period: 2018 through the October 18, 2026 Phoenix race. Win rates use the official finishing order; “won” means a finishing position of first. The p-values are two-sided Fisher exact tests. Nothing here uses proprietary team data, telemetry or estimated tire figures.
Lead image: The field prepares for a restart during the South Point 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 2025. Photo: TaurusEmerald / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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