Andrew Maness is out to “Moneyball” NASCAR.

If that reference misses the mark, it’s the title of a 2003 baseball book detailing how the tight-pocketed Oakland Athletics used advanced analytics to build a winning baseball team using undervalued players.

It was subtitled: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.

Many NASCAR teams face similar hurdles as the small-market teams in Major League Baseball. After all, how fast you want to go often depends on just how much you are able to spend. With modern NASCAR inching closer to a spec series, the status quo has encouraged teams to look for advantages in unorthodox locations.

Enter Maness, who has proven he can help teams gain track position in new ways.

The 29-year-old numbers guru is cut from the same cloth as Bill James — the economist turned executive who changed the way baseball is consumed. Forty years ago, James was working as a security guard at a bean factory when he wrote his first “Baseball Abstract” journal, paving the way for advanced analytics to give an edge to those willing to listen.

Equally unassuming, Maness was working in analytics at the Federal Reserve in 2013 when he founded a website to blaze his own brand of motorsports analysis — NASCARnomics.com.

Most re cently, he has applied his skills at Rho AI, a predictive-outcome firm providing real-time strategy recommendations to Richard Childress Racing. In more effective terms, he managed a program acting as a digital strategist for Ryan Newman, Austin Dillon and Paul Menard in 2017.

A lifelong motorsports enthusiast, Maness cites the 1997 Brickyard 400 as the seminal moment he became obsessed with numbers, witnessing Ricky Rudd win at Indianapolis on pit strategy.

“That was my first inkling of race strategy,” Maness said. “And since then, I’ve tried to understand how that happens — and, more recently, how to make it happen.”

The NASCARnomics blog placed a spotlight on an underappreciated part of motorsports, offering empirical evidence to explain more easily how races were won and lost each weekend. It also devoted equal thoroughness in addressing NASCAR’s attendance and television ratings decline.

That drew NASCAR’s ire, leading to a cease-and-desist order that eventually shut down Maness’ website. The resulting attention put him on the radar of the analytics community, including former NASCAR crew chief Josh Browne, who co-founded Rho AI to serve as a NASCAR gambling tool.

With Maness and his ability to interpret and dissect data, the company’s software was quickly pitched as a competition tool. Colorado-based Rho AI needed someone to manage racing data but also determine what was relevant enough to go into the company’s various algorithms.

“We had software developers working on the back end, but we knew we needed more industry expertise,” Browne said. “We found that in Andrew because he has such a total database of racing knowledge. We saw an opportunity.”

Browne had first conceived a predictive AI strategist program in the mid-2000s while at Evernham Motorsports, but the technology hadn’t caught up to the idea. It wasn’t until he worked at Red Bull Racing that he saw how its Formula 1 team applied resources to analytics.

Rho AI was launched in 2012, and General Motors provided the project’s initial funding. From there, it was literally off to the races with Richard Childress Racing.



The team scored two wins this season on strategy calls. Ryan Newman won Phoenix on a tire gambit while Austin Dillon won the Coca-Cola 600 on fuel mileage. RCR essentially stole two races thanks in large part to motorsports sabermetrics.

Maness incorporates real-time data from every possible outlet, including timing and scoring, loop data and previous race trends. The program then spits out the pit decisions most likely to provide and maintain track position — options like pit-in lap, two tires or four tires.

“We’ve Moneyballed NASCAR,” Browne said. “We’re doing lap-by-lap decisions. By the time a car exits turn 2 at Bristol, we’ve already uploaded 2 million different scenarios to the pit box. They have access to when we think the caution is most likely to come out and optimal strategies for every car on the track.”

Childress competition director Eric Warren was with Browne at Evernham.

“We have various sources of data we can take advantage of to evaluate the performance of our race cars in relation to the competition,” Warren said. “Rho AI and RCR have created a powerful set of tools and infrastructure to predict the best strategies in real time during races. “Our strategy tools have played a key role in our wins this season and have even shown the power of analytics in making real-time decisions.”

For now, Rho AI has an exclusive relationship with Childress. Rho AI also provides predictive strategy elements to ABC TV’s IndyCar coverage. Maness and Browne both believe that NASCAR’s future lies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

And they want to be on the front line — just as Bill James led a baseball revolution.

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