Following Christopher Bell‘s first career NASCAR Cup Series win, NASCAR heads south. This week, racing will take place on the high banks of Homestead-Miami Speedway for the Dixie Vodka 400. Let’s jump into this week’s NASCAR DFS picks preview as we prepare for lineup building on DraftKings and FanDuel.
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Removing the Veil
Now the racing finally begins. I might be in the minority, but I see this weekend as the “real” start to the NASCAR DFS racing calendar. Am I saying that superspeedways and road courses aren’t real racing? No, I am not. However, being successful in superspeedway events is sometimes due to nothing but dumb luck. Yeah, a driver needs to have skill in crash avoidance and knowing how to manipulate the draft. Yet one can be fantastic at both of those skills and still end up in the wall in a fiery blaze. Just ask Brad Keselowski.
As per road courses, navigating a double-digit, multi-turn race efficiently boils down to a different set of skills than we will see this Sunday. These skills will be handier than ever, with six more road courses on the 2021 schedule. On the other hand, we’re on the cusp of seeing nothing but oval racing for the next few months until the Series heads to Austin, Texas.
As per DFS, if you were successful over the past two weeks, it took more than the right picks. You too needed a little luck on your side, especially if you faded Chase Elliott last weekend. It took a questionable caution flag late in the race for Elliott to lose an insurmountable lead, which led to him getting turned by Denny Hamlin and falling back to the 20s.
Now we return to a typical race weekend for DFS: Oval racing in the 200-lap spectrum. Things get more static, and we get a great opportunity to see where these teams are. For example, just how “good” is this 23XI car piloted by Bubba Wallace?
Homestead-Miami Speedway
Homestead, as I’ll refer to it from now on, is an intermediate oval a mile and a half long. When this track was first created, it was literally a smaller version of Indianapolis Motor Speedway. While this quirk was fun on paper, it did not produce good racing. The thing that makes Indianapolis unique is its absurd 2 1/2-mile length. When you shrink that down by a full mile, you don’t see the same type of racing.
Not long after the track’s creation, the Indianapolis-style turns were changed to look more like an oval-style track. With racing still not “fixed,” the track saw another change in 2003 when banking was added to the turns, giving us the track we know today. It is this banking that makes Homestead unique compared to other intermediate venues on the Series calendar. Should a driver wish to, they can hang around the wall all evening as Kyle Larson and Tyler Reddick have shown in the past.
When diving into your own research, you can cross-reference how drivers did at intermediate tracks in 2020 or steeply banked tracks. In fact, this track may have more in common with Darlington than Atlanta or Texas.
Homestead in February?
After a discussion of Homestead’s features, this is our usual jumping-off point for looking at the laps-led data. However, we have to genuinely ask just how sticky are our Homestead numbers from the past few seasons? Let’s look at the scenarios that are impacting how we view Homestead compared to 2020 or 2019.
To begin with, last year’s Homestead race took place in June. I’m never a fan of assuming that race conditions don’t evolve as the air temperature does. Furthermore, what started off as a normal mid-day race was delayed by several hours for lightning. After drivers returned to their cars this event became a night race. If a team set their car up for an afternoon race in the Florida heat and humidity (Kevin Harvick) they were all but done when the race restarted.
Furthermore, our numbers from 2019 and 2018 come from the championship races of those respective seasons. If you’re new to NASCAR DFS, for nearly two decades, all three NASCAR Series saw their champions crowned at Homestead in the final race of the season. Now Homestead is just another race on the calendar. implications have completely shifted from life-altering to this race being a small part of the puzzle. The gap in motivation for drivers to perform well couldn’t be any larger. Four drivers had their sights set on beating one another and winning the championship while everyone else was trying to stay out of the way. Now it’s just one race out of 26 that helps decide who does and doesn’t go to the playoffs.
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Looking Back to 2020
Which way do we turn? For clarity’s sake, I created two Super Sheets in the Race Sheets this week. The numbers in columns F through U highlight the most recent races at Homestead. Meanwhile, on the first sheet, numbers following column BA highlight all intermediate oval races in 2020. A healthy 13 race sample. On the secondary Super Sheet, you can cross-reference the past three Homestead races with numbers from drivers at tracks classified as “steep” that are larger than a mile and a half. That data sample is six races in total.
Ok, you say, these driver averages are fantastic but what should our expectations be for this race on Sunday? For that answer, I turn us back to one of the deep dives I did during the off-season – the 2020 Post Covid Heat Map. If you haven’t yet, I did a breakdown of my findings and what my expectations were for this season in the 550 horsepower package.
This weekend’s race, like those other races, will be held with no practice or qualifying. the set-up drivers have at the shop is what they roll in with on the first wave of the green flag. So to me, the key is to not just look at the individual driver’s numbers but overall at the field. These heat maps tend to point to a trend – a 2020 trend that we can expect to play out in 2021.
Post-Covid-19 Numbers
First off, drivers who started in the top 12 finished there. Ninety-one of 168 top-10 finishers started in the top 12 in the 550-horsepower package, post COVID. Furthermore, 54 of 70 top-five finishes came from drivers who started 12th or better in this package. What might surprise you about these numbers, though, is that the pole sitter did not carry the best average finish, in fact, they were only third best (9.857).
Where these drivers finish on average is only part of the story. The tale we worry about more are laps led because those correlate more to fantasy points in these races with more laps being run. Once more, if a driver wants to lead laps, they had to start near the front. The top 12 starting positions, in terms of average laps led, all came from drivers starting in the top 12 or higher. This time it should be no surprise that the pole sitter led the most laps on average (45.21) while the next four highest lap leaders started sixth, ninth, and second.
What is surprising though is only twice did the polesitter lead the most laps in these fourteen events. Albeit, one of those races was Homestead but I’ve already discussed the asterisk attached to that race. For clarity’s sake, polesitter Denny Hamlin led just one lap before the rain and lightning delays. If the rain hadn’t fallen and the race hadn’t become a night race, who knows just how Hamlin would have fared?
My supposition is that we would have seen numbers similar to most other races, wherein the polesitter leads some laps but certainly not the most. In fact, in ten of those fourteen races, the polesitter failed to not just lead the most laps but the second-most either. Don’t forget, all of these races saw early cautions so teams could inspect tires and make early changes. It was almost always during these cautions the pole sitters lost their leads. For the most part, they never got them back either.
Concluding Thoughts
With Hamlin back on the pole, this is going to be a fascinating week for gauging DFS players’ trust levels. Are most people going to blindly follow the polesitter, especially with a top-tier driver starting up top again? Or will people give credence to these numbers and look for lap leaders further on down the starting grid. Without the aforementioned practice, all we have to lean on are these numbers. Just how strongly they correlate to this season is the big question for DFS this Sunday at the Dixie Vodka 400.
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