Hey y’all. Put on those cutoff shirts and jorts, it’s NASCAR time. Likely to fall through the cracks this weekend with everybody thinking about NFL on Sunday and college football Saturday, I expect there to be some overlay on DraftKings with most of the sharp competition paying attention to other things. I don’t know anything about NASCAR or taking left turns, but I’m good at drinkin’ beer and turning things into math problems. Pacifico for me tonight.

Here’s a spreadsheet I put together, data comes from fantasyracingcheatsheet.com.

I still don’t know how to predict fastest laps and laps led because a direct percentile correlation cannot apply because the cars and pole positions are different every time. Driver ratings fluctuate too. What we can predict though is expected average finishing position based on the speed of car in practice, pole position, track history, and driver rating.

The fundamental place to find fantasy points is in place differential. The difference between finishing first and last is only 20 fantasy points or so, but if you start first and finish last, which happens plenty due to a crash, then you lose 41 points due to place differential and then score 20ish for the last place finish. If you start last and finish last then you score 20 points because your place differential is zero.

Therefore my strategy is to find a nice pool of cheap picks that will be the foundation of my fantasy team and then take a collection of expensive drivers with upside. I like to avoid popular drivers in GPPs, hoping they wreck, but predicting ownership in NASCAR is difficult. About a month ago I thought Jimmy Johnson was a must play, yet he was less than 20% owned.

We need to have laps led to win big GPPs. I don’t know how to predict them either, but what I do know is that in the last five races here, Brad Keselowski has led 648 laps. Next closest is Kurt Busch with 400, and then Jeff Gordon with 222. Clint Bowyer has 185, Matt Kenseth has 180 and Joey Logano has 140. Juan Pablo Montoya has 67, Carl Edwards, Kevin Harvick, and Kyle Busch are in the 40s and then six drivers have 10 or less. There are 40 drivers who have never led a lap here! That means that we need to be targeting top drivers with those names starting in the top of the pack with fast cars. Such as:

Brad Keselowski. $11,200. Sixth fastest car, qualified third. Has to get past Logano and Kenseth for the lead, they both had the 12th fastest cars in practice. Keselowski has led more laps here than anybody.

Kurt Busch. Nice discount at $9,800. Should have won last week, got bumped from behind, saved it. Climbed from 21st to seventh in last seven laps. Has led second most laps here. Starts eighth but I like his history here and he typically goes under-owned.

I’ll want some Kevin Harvick ($11,400) too cause he’s the best driver out there these days and checks in a fast car again, and Kyle Busch ($10,8000) looks great as usual. He was an easy fade last week with his backup car, hopefully he burned some people lowering his ownership this week.

Now is where the spreadsheet does work. Since we can safely assume that most of the field will never lead a lap here, we want to target good drivers with fast cars that are back in the pack due to a bad qualifying round. Sorting the sheet by points per dollar, we find:

Dale Earnhardt Jr. ($8,400) He was in almost every one of my lineups last week and 15 of my 18 lineups cashed. Thanks, Junior. Unfortunately he was very popular, and I expect him to be very popular again with the 13th fastest car and he qualified 29th.

Greg Biffle comes up high on my sheet but I don’t know why. He qualified 38th so he has a nice floor, but besides being a good driver it’s going to be hard for him to move up with the 38th fastest car in practice too. He’s only $6,800 though. In trying to learn why his car is so slow, I dug up this article.

It has nice data for the top 10 drivers. Nothing about Biffle, but it notes that Phoenix and New Hampshire are corollary tracks, and Biffle didn’t do well at either of those tracks this year. I can usually find the narrative or reasoning behind math brining a guy forward, I can’t here with Biffle.

Clint Bowyer ($7,500) has great track history here at Richmond. He starts 26th and has the 20th fastest car. He has a solid driver rating this season, which is nearly complete. He started 17th here in April, finished ninth. Couple years back he started 23rd and finished seventh.

AJ Allmendinger looks good to me. I notice that he is usually under-owned. He has the 10th fastest car and starts 21st. He’s only $6,000! He should be a staple in my lineups.

Have fun, enjoy having a sweat while pondering NFL players!

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