How Often Does the Trailing Car Win a Photo Finish?

While Mayer scored his fifth career win in Xfinity and turned around what had been a disastrous start to 2024, it was a heartbreaker for Sieg, who was less than a blink of an eye away from his first-ever win in his 342nd Xfinity start. Even more so, considering that he looked to have an insurmountable lead as the laps ticked down … that is, until Mayer made up serious ground in the final sets of circuits, pulled even on the backstretch in the final lap and nipped Sieg at the line.

But Saturday’s finish poses an interesting question: how often does the driver running second at the white flag successfully complete the pass in a photo finish, and how often does the lead car successfully fend off the challenge?

In other words, how many photo finishes also featured a last-lap pass?

To start, I will be looking at all the finishes in NASCAR Cup Series, Xfinity and Craftsman Truck Series history that were decided by an official margin of victory of 0.030 seconds or less. No given interval denotes what is and what isn’t a photo finish, so I had to draw an arbitrary line at 0.030 to not completely drown this article in what is already a huge table of stats and numbers.

For this study, I will be excluding photo finishes that occurred at Daytona International Speedway, Talladega Superspeedway and the current Atlanta Motor Speedway configuration. Photo finishes on drafting tracks are more frequent and an entirely different animal, so I wanted to keep this confined to unrestricted ovals. The next time we have a photo finish on a drafting track, however, I might do a similar study for said finishes.

Anyway, 29 races have been decided by 0.030 seconds or less on unrestricted ovals in the history of NASCAR’s top three series. One occurred on a road course, four occurred on short tracks and the remaining 24 happened at ovals between one and two miles in length.

Below are said finishes, complete with the margin of victory, the series, the track…