NASCAR is BACK! Yes! Alright it’s not fully back until next week when the Daytona 500 kicks off the season as far as points-races go, but that won’t stop us from playing DFS for the Advance Auto Parts Clash as both Fanduel and DraftKings have contests for it.
A few quick things about this race to start us off:
It’s a 75-lap exhibition race with a competition caution 25 laps in (unless a caution happens sooner) with 20 drivers in the field. The drivers qualified for the race by being pole sitters from 2018, former Clash winners, former Daytona 500 winners, and drivers that qualified for the playoffs in 2018 that didn’t already qualify in another way. The cars utilize the same restrictor plate package that is used in the Daytona 500 next week and the track is the same 2.5-mile layout Daytona always is, so the only real changes is the race length and having about half as many cars starting the race as normal.
In the last five races (only going back that far because of all the car and team changes since then) the average starting spot for the eventual winner has been 11.6 with the last winner from the pole being Denny Hamlin in 2014 and no one winnings from P2-P8 in that span (though they’ve been close). Even though it’s a limited number of laps in the sample we’re using, two drivers have broken the 95+ laps led mark and no one else in this field is over 30 laps led in that same time frame and those two drivers account for three of the last five wins as well.
The points this week will be far lower than standard races since it’s only 75 laps long and that means there’s a total of 56.25 bonus points in DK available across the field and in FD there are just 15 points for laps led and laps completed total. The position differential points are also less this week since the max someone can get is 19 if they start last and win, all of that leads to less overall points being posted so adjust accordingly.
I will breakdown every driver in the field this week, though this won’t be a typical occurrence throughout the rest of the season, since there are just 20 cars in the field. One other note is that I would recommend only playing GPPs this week with maybe a small dip into the cash contest pool. Just like other sports with small-field slates, ownership will be so high it will inflate the cash lines.
Stacks
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