If you haven’t been keeping track, Sunday’s (Sept. 8) Quaker State 400 at Atlanta Motor Speedway was the 11th race of the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season to end in overtime.
If it sounds like a lot, it is.
Since the start of the Gen 6 era in 2013, the series has seen roughly six to 10 overtime finishes each year, with a few exceptions.
| Year | Overtime Finishes |
| 2013 | 5 |
| 2014 | 7 |
| 2015 | 8 |
| 2016 | 10 |
| 2017 | 11 |
| 2018 | 8 |
| 2019 | 6 |
| 2020 | 9 |
| 2021 | 6 |
| 2022 | 8 |
| 2023 | 10 |
| 2024 | 11* (through 27 races) |
This year is one of those exceptions, and in the 20 years since overtime’s implementation at the Cup level, 2024 joins 2017 as the only two seasons to feature at least 11 overtime finishes.
It’s only gotten more bizarre as the season’s progressed. A summer stretch between the Brickyard 400 and the 400-mile race at Daytona International Speedway marked the first time the series has seen four consecutive overtime finishes, and of the last 10 Cup races, only two of them have ended at the scheduled distance.
Two.
- New Hampshire: Overtime
- Nashville: Overtime (x5)
- Chicago: Darkness Shortened
- Pocono: Scheduled Distance
- Indianapolis: Overtime (x2)
- Richmond: Overtime
- Michigan: Overtime (x2)
- Daytona: Overtime
- Darlington: Scheduled Distance
- Atlanta: Overtime
Keep in mind that there are still nine races to go. And with another superspeedway in Talladega Superspeedway a few weeks away, it’s all but a guarantee that 2024 will break the record.
The question isn’t whether the record will be broken, but rather by how much. Will we end the season with 12 overtime finishes? Thirteen? Fifteen? Eighteen?
Twenty?
In some ways, it feels like a cruel joke.
There’s a 100-plus lap green-flag run in the final stage? Boom, some mid-pack car crashes with two to go to bring out a yellow. There’s a rash of late cautions in the closing stages of the race? Another car wrecks for good measure to send the race into extra time. Have an overtime restart where the entire pack is running low on fuel? We’ll just keep having cars wrecking, only to bring out more yellows and run everyone’s fuel tanks dry.
Even at Richmond Raceway in August, in a race where the first 398 laps went caution free outside of the stage breaks, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., right on cue, crashes to bring out a caution on lap 399 — a caution that wound up leading to one of the most infamous endings in recent memory.
In many ways, it’s starting to feel like more of a surprise where there…
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