NASCAR DFS: Southern 500 Track Breakdown

Is this September or May? Let’s check the temps...nope Google says the same average highs and lows are happening. Hmmm...ah wait a second...it’s the start of the playoffs so it must be September. Glad we cleared that up. It was hard to tell since the NASCAR season started back up in May at Darlington with two points races. Now comes one of the Crown Jewel races in the Cup series in the Southern 500 at the Lady In Black.

This is the traditional spot for the Southern 500 but this is the first time that that traditional weekend is in the playoffs which adds that much more intrigue and pressure to an already grueling race. Five-Hundred miles around the rough, tire-eating, asphalt of Darlington Raceway isn’t exactly the easiest test on drivers and teams and cars alike. If you need a refresher, Darlington, or the track known as Too Tough To Tame, is a 1.36-mile track that is banked at 25 degrees in Turns 1 & 2 and 23 degrees in Turns 3 & 4. Not only are the turns banked differently, the second set of turns is a tighter radius than the first set giving it its famed egg-shape.

The track is notorious for causing drivers to get into the wall and give them what’s known as a Darlington Stripe on the side of the car and with the pressure of the post-season kicking off, except it to force more errors for the drivers. They did race this track twice earlier in the year so the setups for most teams should be pretty well set unless of course they didn’t do all that well in either of the shorter races back in May. The tires will be the same as they ran in May here and at Homestead in June but tire management will still be a key thing to watch on the longer runs as the track eats tires at a fairly quick rate, hence the Cup teams getting 13 sets of Goodyears.

The stages are 115-115-137 on Sunday evening and so pits will be involved in every stage of the race even if its green flag for most or all of those laps.

In terms of manufacturer performance, this has mainly been a playground for Toyota recently.

Strategy Notes

As we saw in the first two races, laps led here will be a key stat and with this race being longer than either of the first two races here, even more will be in play. This is also a track where winners have come from the top-15 spots nearly every race out of 117 in the track’s history but position differential is possible here as an average of six drivers have managed double-digit position differential over the last five races run. We will be building our cash lines much like other intermediate tracks and GPPs we can sell out a bit more for dominator points. The podcast this week will focus on strategy regarding playoff and non-playoff drivers for DFS as well as do the normal field breakdown.

Core Drivers By Tier

Tier 1 - Kevin Harvick

• Harvick was great here in May and over the last four races here his 3.0 average finish is best in the field

• His 113.6 average driver rating is best in the field as well as are his dominator points over the last four races.

• Harvick wants to send a message quickly in the playoffs that he’s clearly the one to beat for the championship.

Tier 2 - Erik Jones

• Jones is going to be a major chalk play in every format this week and we caught a break on his price.

• Starting P30 and having an average finish of 5.5 in the last four races here including a win in last year’s Southern 500 makes him hard to avoid.

• He’s essentially a lock and load play this week.

Tier 3 - Ryan Newman

• Newman is starting P31 but has an average finish of 17.8 in the last four races here.

• He finished P14 and P15 in the two races here earlier this year.

• Newman was visibly upset with how last week’s Daytona race ended and so getting Newman racing mad is usually a good thing.

Contrarian Play - Chris Buescher

• He’s starting P20 which might keep people from playing him but he did move up well here in the second race in May.

• Buescher has posted two top-15 finishes in the last four races here.

• He’s been averaging a 12.8 average finish in the last five races this year.

Fade - Cole Custer

• Custer has not been doing anything spectacular in the last five races or really since winning at Kentucky.

• The first two runs at Darlington haven’t been good for him and in the first race he started P14 and finished P22.

• He’d need a top-10 finish to hit value and in the last 10 races this year every time he’s started inside the top-20 he’s gone backward all but one time out of six races.

Last Four Darlington Races

Tier 1

Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4

Top-20 Drivers Over Last 8 Darlington Races

Top-20 Drivers At Similar Races

(Darlington, Homestead, Chicago, Las Vegas)

Momentum

This shows the last five races of the season and the driver’s stats so we can see who is coming in hot and who’s coming in cold.

Drivers

Tier 1

Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4

Team

Price Changes

These tables show the difference in pricing for each driver from the first race here in May to the race this weekend. A positive in the difference column means they are more expensive this time while a negative shows they are cheaper.

Finishing Ranges By Starting Spot Ranges

Weekly Rankings

Race Hist, Track Hist, Type Hist are all ranked on average finish position over the last four races at the track, five races this season, eight races at this track, and similar races respectively. The Avg. Rating and Top-15 % columns are ranked on those categories in the last four races at this track. The L8 PD column ranks the position differential over the last eight races from best (most positive) to worst (most negative).

Tier 1

Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4

DFS Value Averages

This replaces the DFS Scoring Averages table that had been here. Instead, we have the DFS Value figures instead. We have taken their points scored over the last two and five races on each site and averaged those out and then divided that average by their salary divided by 1,000.

Tier 1

Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4