Grading our NASCAR preseason questions: See who won the 2022 edition


In January, a subscriber to The Athletic named Al M. dropped his predictions into the comments section of our annual NASCAR preseason questions post.

Even then, before we’d seen a car on the racetrack, Al seemed to sense this year was going to be a tough one for prognosticating.

“Always appreciate being able to state my thoughts and then have them shoved down my throat at the end of the year when I find out how much I really didn’t know. LMAO!!!” he wrote.

Well, Al, we’ve got some bad news: That comment was your only correct prediction for 2022.

Al, like 23 percent of our 272 participants this year, completely whiffed on getting any of the answers correct to our five questions.

Hey, there’s no shame in that. Not when we’re talking about the 2022 NASCAR season, anyway. A whopping 69 percent of all players had one or less correct answer — including me, who was somehow the defending champion from 2021.

Yes, the outcome of this NASCAR season really was that hard to anticipate for most of us. But one person still managed to get 3.5 points out of a possible five: Craig S., who eked out a win over Aaron F. (3.25 points) to become the new Preseason NASCAR Questions Champion.

How did Craig do it? We’ll recap the questions below, laugh at our pain and reveal the new champ’s path to glory.


Question 1: How many races will Kyle Larson win?

This one was immediately a dud for most participants. Larson was coming off a 10-win season and had one of the most dominant championship runs to date in 2021. Surely, most figured, the new Next Gen car wouldn’t impact Larson that badly … right?

Welp. Larson won only three races this season, which was fewer than 94 percent of players figured he’d have. To be fair, stats were down all across the board in the Cup Series during a parity-filled year.

Only 14 of the 272 participants got Larson’s win total exactly right — a feat even Craig S. cannot claim (he guessed six).

The average of all answers was 5.6 victories for Larson. My prediction was five.

Question 2: What will Brad Keselowski’s average finish be?

While 78 percent of players predicted Keselowski’s average finish in his first season as a driver/owner at RFK Racing would decline over his final year at Team Penske (13.0) — including a commenter who claimed to be Keselowski himself and guessed 14.0 — few expected such a steep dropoff.

The 38-year-old ended up with a 19.2 average finish, the worst since his first full season in 2010 (22.4). That caught most of us by surprise (my guess was 14.5); only three of the 272 entries had Keselowski with a lower average finish in their predictions.

That made it tricky to score this answer, so I gave credit for anyone who was within two positions of Keselowski’s actual average (which was only 9 percent of participants).

Craig S., by the way, got one point for this answer with a guess of 17.5.

Question 3: Who will be the winningest organization and how many victories will that team have?

The first…

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Read More: Grading our NASCAR preseason questions: See who won the 2022 edition 2022-11-21 20:16:25

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