What Happens If A NASCAR Race Ends In A Tie?

The NASCAR world is still talking about Kyle Larson’s historic win over Chris Buescher at Kansas Speedway, which is the closest in Cup Series history … for now.

The official margin of victory was .001 seconds, although it may have been a little closer than that.

NASCAR rounds the results to the nearest thousandth of a second, so .0009 margin would be listed as .001 as well. But there is an exception to this rule.

There is one NASCAR race that was closer than Kansas, but not in the Cup Series.

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Tyler Reddick won the season-opening 2018 Xfinity Series race at Daytona International Speedway by .0004 seconds over Elliott Sadler and that’s the figure NASCAR uses, because .000 would suggest it was a tie. But what if there is a tie? It’s not likely, but it is technically possible.

If that happens, the first tiebreaker is the number of laps led during the race, which, of course, can also be tied. After that it goes to the number of laps in second, third, fourth, etc…

Granted, if the stars and all of the galaxies in the universe align, that can all still end up equal. At that point, whichever driver was the first to have reached the highest position during the race is declared the winner. Even if that happed on the first lap, there’s your winner.

Someone smart than us will have to figure out the odds of that happening, but this discussion isn’t entirely academic.

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Just this February, Daniel Suarez won at Atlanta Motor Speedway by .003 seconds, which is the third-closest margin of victory in a Cup Series race. So tight finishes can happen at any time.

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And the next race is at Darlington Raceway, where Ricky Craven crossed the line .002 seconds ahead of Kurt Busch in the spring of 2003, which was the closest finish until Jimmie Johnson’s Aaron’s 499 victory at Talladega Superspeedway tied it in 2011.