Jay Worlton – Building Racer’s Breakdown

News/Journalism

Racer’s Breakdown is a podcast with auto racing sports analytics content.

With 15 years of devoted viewing of auto racing, I’ve become pretty good at picking out the drivers that can win on any given race-day. The purpose of Racer’s Breakdown is to use racing statistics to quantify intangibles and evaluate the performances of drivers and teams.

There are two main parts to this project, metric and database building, and content creation. In order to make effective predictions and evaluations, I needed to build a metric that can generally predict a driver’s finish at a given race. I call this metric the Correct Average Result or CAR and it can usually predict 7 of the top 10 finishers in a given race.

I calculated CAR using a Google Sheet that contains data queries from a database of race results. Using this, I can create content that says, “I pick this driver to win and here’s why.” Or “I think this driver is underperforming and here’s why.”

I define success in this project by two different metrics. The first is compatibility with the spreadsheet. I want the spreadsheet to be easily expandable and reliable if I change something. My spreadsheet is at that point and can continuously produce the content I need.

The second gauge for success is regular content. I did two podcasts in two weeks, with just the right length and they all had time for deep dives into the storylines of the season and the analytics.

This project has been a major success, and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I enjoyed creating it.