Northeast NASA Super Touring Field Analysis

Published: October 25, 2014

To help me decide what to do with my 240sx I went through 2014 results for NASA Northeast and NASA Mid-Atlantic specifically looking for which cars ran in ST1, ST2 and ST3 and how successful they were.

The raw data is available in CSV format here.

First, a couple of notes on data itself. I indicated car models with as much specificity as was given in the results. In Mid-Atlantic results there are never any car years given, therefore it is impossible to tell C5 Corvettes from C6 ones. In Northeast results the year is sometimes absent.

Cars are arranged in race finishing order. I ignored qualifying times because I personally care about winning races - if I wanted to run qualifying only I would have been researching time trials. The times are best lap times for the respective car in the race. This lap time indicates car potential to win, whereas finishing position is a combination of car potential and driver skill. An absent lap time typically means the car never entered the race; disqualified cars that completed laps would have lap times.

While compiling these results I noticed the following:

• ST3 is a virtually dead class in both regions.
• Northeast has pretty consistent ST1 and ST2 fields. ST2 is generally more subscribed than ST1. There is a healthy Super Unlimited field as well which is roughly as big as ST1/ST2.
• Mid-Atlantic has a large Super Unlimited field and very thin ST1 and ST2 fields, often one car from ST1 and one car from ST2. For reasons unknown to me there are many ST1 and ST2 cars that do not run races despite continuing to register for them.
• ST1 and ST2 are very obviously dominated by V8-engined cars. Corvette is the most popular one but there are Mustangs and Factory Five cars providing healthy competition. There is a BMW 318is which I can only assume has a V8 since it is classified in ST1. There is a single Evo 8 in the Northeast and a single STI in Mid-Atlantic representing non-V8 engined cars.