What is 0verrated.net?
Stock car racing has no serious ratings culture. Baseball has WAR, basketball has a dozen competing plus-minus frameworks, and NASCAR has finishing position — a number that conflates the driver, the car, the crew, and whatever happened on lap 140.
0verrated.net builds the ratings NASCAR doesn’t have, across all three national series, and publishes them every week.
Why ratings, and why here
I’m Stuart Slagle. I spent two decades as a racing official — racing secretary at Woodbine, Prairie Meadows, Louisiana Downs, and tracks in Albuquerque, Austin, Denver, and Vancouver — which means I spent twenty-plus years doing the thing ratings are actually for: deciding who belongs in which race. Condition books are rating systems with legal force. They determine eligibility, competitive balance, and whether a race is worth watching before a single entry is taken.
That’s an unusual background to bring to motorsport, and it produces an unusual question. Most racing analysis asks who is fastest. I’m more interested in what the field structure did to the answer.
Why stock cars and not horses
I tested this first with CIELO Ratings, applying an Elo framework to both NASCAR’s three national series and thoroughbred racing. The motor racing version worked considerably better, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of effort.
Racing-Reference catalogs 19,881 drivers and counting across its full historical and active database — a population roughly equal to a single annual North American foal crop. But those drivers are distributed across about one percent of the time span, and the same competitors reappear week after week for years. Horses race a handful of times and retire. Drivers accumulate hundreds of observations against a stable comparison set. Rating systems need repeated head-to-head results, and stock car racing supplies them at a density that thoroughbred racing cannot.
My professional work remains in thoroughbred racing. This site stays on stock cars.
The name
Every rating produces the same argument: this driver is overrated, that one is underrated. The whole point is to make that argument with evidence instead of instinct. The first character is a zero, not a capital O.