NASA Track
Records

About the data

One row per driver: their personal best at that track in that class, ranked to the top ten. A driver appears under whichever class they entered that weekend — the same person can hold entries in several. Click a name to expand every lap that driver has on record in that class at that track, with the car each was set in.

Lap counts and percentiles. The count beside each class is every lap recorded for it at that track — one entry per driver per race day, across all eight seasons and three regions. That full set is what the percentile under each time measures against: the share of those laps this one beats. The class record never reads 100%, because it is itself one of the laps in the set — in a 200-lap class it beats 199 of 200, or 99.5%. So a 99.5% means nothing was quicker; a 75% in a four-lap class means three drivers have ever posted a time. Read the percentile next to the lap count — in a thin class it says more about turnout than pace.

The curve is that same set of laps as a distribution — quick on the left, slow on the right. The solid red rule is the class record; the dashed grey rule is the median. Hover anywhere on it to read the lap time at that point. The left edge is the record itself and the right edge is the 95th percentile, so one very slow lap can’t squash the shape; where the record is flagged below as a probable mis-time, it is excluded and pinned to the left edge as a dashed rule instead. Classes with fewer than twelve recorded laps get the individual laps as dots — there is no distribution to estimate.

Winning laps are the second curve, and the average beside it. One race day produces one winning lap — the quickest in that class that day — but only days with three or more competitors are counted. Nearly half the race days in this archive are one- or two-car affairs, where the quickest lap records who turned up rather than what it took to win; including them would drag every average toward the pace of an empty class. Competitors are counted as distinct drivers, so a driver who ran two cars in one class on the same day is one entry, not two. On this curve the red rule is the average winning time rather than the record, and the dashed grey rule is the median; the axis labels still read fastest on the left, 95th percentile on the right. Classes whose every race day was that thin show no curve at all — there is nothing here that meets the bar.

Where the times come from. Each is the Overall BestTm from a day’s Time Trial final results sheet — a solo run against the clock, not a race lap. Super Touring and other wheel-to-wheel results are not included.

Car make and model is taken from the results sheet when it carries that column. Some seasons print a sponsor column in its place, so roughly half the laps have no car recorded; those entries simply show the car number.

Every configuration is its own board. A lap set clockwise is not a lap set counter-clockwise, and a club course is not a pro course, so Buttonwillow’s numbered layouts, Chuckwalla and Thunderhill’s two directions, Mid-Ohio’s two courses and NOLA’s variants are all listed separately. Pooling them would invent records nobody set. Two exceptions, each decided by comparing the lap times rather than the names: NASA runs one configuration at Road Atlanta, so the three lengths its sheets record are treated as one track; and Daytona’s Southeast and Florida laps share a board, because it is the same 3.6-mile road course. Names that differ only in spelling — a stray capital, a missing letter, a session title left on the front — are settled onto one form. The region badge on each row says where a lap was set.

provFrom a provisional sheet that has not been finalized.

?More than 8% faster than the next driver in that class. Almost certainly a mis-timed lap in the source data rather than a real record — worth checking against the session sheet before quoting it.

date?The sheet carried no date of its own, so the date was inferred from the archive’s file listing and may be off by a day.