The starting point of reference
The motorsports media breathed a collective sigh of relief this week when http://www.racing-reference.com/ got back online.
It was down Sunday, and the first thing I thought of was that NASCAR had somehow managed to find a way to shut it down. I am a little embarrassed to admit that, since my first thought SHOULD have been, “Gee, I hope Alan Boodman is OK.”
Boodman is the guy who put the site together, and I did call to check on when I got back from California. When he got back to me he said he was fine but there had been a problem with his webhost’s server.
Whatever that means.
If you’re a NASCAR fan and you’ve never seen this website, I urge you to take a look at it. I don’t owe Boodman any money and he’s not paying me to give him a plug. Best I can tell, he doesn’t make money on the site anyhow.
I ran across it a couple of years ago doing research for my book on Tim Richmond when I was trying to find a definitive source for Richmond’s Busch Series records statistics.
The more I looked at it, the more interesting it was. It’s a database of EVERY Nextel Cup, Busch, Truck and International Race of Champions race. You can look up any driver’s career record. You can look up records by car owner. By season. By track. You can check a driver’s record at any track.
Go to the “driver vs. driver” section and type in the names of any two drivers in history. Within a second, you’ll know how many times they raced against each other what their comparative results were in those races.
For example, Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson have both been in 163 races. Johnson has won 21 of them and Gordon 16. Johnson has finished ahead of Gordon 89 times and behind Gordon 74 times in those races.
You can also go to the “driver rankings” page and get a list of, say, the drivers who’ve been running at the finish of the most races from 1996 until right now. Mark Martin tops that list, at 479 races, followed by Dale Jarrett, Ken Schrader and Sterling Marlin.
Now why would you want to know such a thing? Well, who knows? But if you did, it’s there.
I’ve been using http://www.racing-reference.com/ for a couple of years now and have almost become its press agent. I’ve showed it to dozens of my colleagues and they use it now, too. Once you figure out what all is there, it’s incredibly easy to use and so far I haven’t found a single error on it.
Boodman lives in Pennsylvania and worked with databases for a living. He got interested in NASCAR and decided he wanted to do this, so he started building his records with history books and other such information.
If you’re really a fan, you should check it out. You can thank me later.