About the data
Sources
| Series | Primary sources |
|---|---|
| NASCAR Cup, O’Reilly & Truck | The community-maintained nascaR.data project plus NASCAR’s public timing & scoring feeds |
| Formula 1 | f1db and jolpica-f1, the community successor to the Ergast API |
| IndyCar | Hand-compiled from official results, INDYCAR’s public results API, Wikipedia race reports and ChampCarStats.com — see the reconstruction notes below |
Race timing coverage
A race “carries time intervals” when its box score records each runner’s deficit to the winner. Counts are computed from the published dataset itself, so this table always matches what the race pages show.
| Series | Race box scores | With time intervals | Laps-down only | No public source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NASCAR Cup Series | 2849 | 63 | 2786 | |
| NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series | 1429 | 58 | 1371 | |
| NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series | 755 | 43 | 712 | |
| NTT IndyCar Series | 472 | 369 | 102 | 1 |
| Formula 1 | 1162 | 1136 | 26 |
Reconstructing the IndyCar intervals
No single public source carries IndyCar finishing gaps across 1996–2026, so they were rebuilt from several: INDYCAR’s results API records each car’s gap to the winner outright from 2013 on and elapsed times for 2010–2012 (gaps derived by subtraction), and Wikipedia race reports’ time-of-race tables cover most of 1996–1998 and 2006–2009. Where two sources overlap they were cross-validated and agree to within 0.001 s on every row checked before either was written. Identity is proved per race, not assumed: a source is only accepted when it puts the recorded winner in P1, matches at least 75% of driver names, and reproduces at least 80% of the finishing order — so a race with the same winner in the same season can never donate its gaps to a sibling event. The 1999–2005 IRL era published no per-car timing anywhere public, so those races carry laps-down positions only; the rare race with no usable public source at all is counted in the table above rather than papered over.
NASCAR and Formula 1 races all carry times from their feeds; the one NASCAR holdout (a 2025 race whose weekend feed shipped empty) was recovered from NASCAR’s archived final live-feed snapshot after that snapshot reproduced two other races’ stored intervals to the millisecond.
Verification
Season standings are rebuilt from the underlying season rows and checked against the published tables before a release; every internal link on the pre-rendered pages is machine-checked at build time; and every page carries the as-of date of the data it was built from. Spot an error? The fastest fix is comparing the race page against the official box score — corrections ship with the next weekly update.
Citing Lead Lap
Cite or quote this data freely, commercially or otherwise — it is compiled from public sources. A link back to leadlapdata.com is appreciated and helps others find the archive.
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