Driver Success in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series: The Impact of Multi-Car Teams

Abstract

This paper explores the impact of multi-car teams on driver wins, total points, and total earnings in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series for the years of 2005 through 2008. Early in NASCAR’s history, multi-car teams were rare as the conventional wisdom was that multi-car teams would have poor chemistry which would negatively impact driver performance. Recently, however, multi-car teams have become more popular. Using season-level data, we show that multi-car teams generally enjoy a competitive advantage on the track over single-car teams but that diminishing returns to the number of cars on a team mitigates the motivation for arbitrarily large teams.peer effects, returns to scale, motor sports