Those summaries, distributed to members by The Associate Press, were tweaked, hence the difference. Gone was the driver’s winnings, replaced a formula NASCAR made up called driver rating. (They’ve since added winnings — a pretty meaningless stat — back into the summaries.)

NASCAR’s own description of driver rating: “Formula combining the following categories: Wins, Finishes, Top-15 Finishes, Average Running Position While on Lead Lap, Average Speed Under Green, Fastest Lap, Led Most Laps, Lead-Lap Finish. Maximum: 150 points per race.”

In other words, it’s not much different than the NFL and college versions of the quarterback rating: a quick way to compare statistical analyses.

Here’s the problem: there’s no context to it. We know that 150 is the maximum, but what does that mean? Is the maximum even achievable?

We know that, according to the QB rating formula, quarterbacks can and have had perfect games. And here’s what we know about driver rating, based on the stats from the final half of the 2007 schedule.
Only twice did a driver achieve the 150-point max, Clint Bowyer in New Hampshire and Kurt Busch at Pocono. Matt Kenseth’s win at Homestead came close at 149.8. On the flip side, the best rating at Talladega was Denny Hamlin’s 109; the best rating at Atlanta was Busch’s 124.2. Most top ratings were somewhere in the 130s, but at least we have a baseline.

What is unusual is that, in eight of the 16 races, the winning driver didn’t have the highest driver rating. There was no bigger disparity that at Talladega, where race winner Jeff Gordon was actually 20th in driver rating. At Daytona, winner Jamie McMurray finished eighth in driver rating.

In the remaining six cases, the winner was either second or third in driver rating.

On its face, this is reasonable. The best car and the best driver don’t always win the race, a simple fact. But most of the time, they are going to win. Over the course of even 400 miles, the best equipment and talent will separate itself.

It’s hard for me to believe that in nearly half the races, the best driver or the best car didn’t win the race. That seems illogically high to me, since there were only a handful of true fuel-mileage finishes last year — Casey Mears at the Coca-Cola 600 and Juan Pablo Montoya at Sonoma spring to mind — than what the driver rating seems to indicate.

Then again, some people think the QB rating formula needs a tweak, too.

Maybe driver rating will become an accepted statistic yet as QB rating has. But until then, there still is no context to understand what the number means. (Then again, this could very well evolve into a chicken-egg argument.)

We had a discussion about agate a few months ago on one of the message boards I frequent. Someone wondered why a newspaper would ever bother using AP’s golf agate that included the score with relation to par — you know: 1. Tiger Woods 64-72-71-66—273 -15. (AP also sends a version that doesn’t include the score with relation to par.)

I countered I couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t use it. Relation to par gives you an indication of how well the golfer played and how the course was playing. At 15-under, Woods had a decent tournament; if there are scores at like 13-under and 12-under, you know the course wasn’t terribly difficult.

It’s much harder to deduce that information from simply seeing a 273.

At the moment, it’s hard to link driver rating to any sort of true indication of driver performance. Maybe in time that will happen, but that’s not the case now.