So you’ve found your way into the NASCAR section of Fantasy Alarm huh? Don’t freak out. It’s okay and quite frankly it’s the best DFS sweat out there. There’s also seasonal contests that we’ll touch on too, but first let’s get you used to the terminology, schedule and driver changes, and overall things you’ll hear us talk about throughout the season in the content, podcasts, chat, and Twitter.
Intro to Terminology
Just like all other DFS sports, NASCAR has its own lingo to describe strategies or plays in certain ways. If you’ve played DFS before you’ll be familiar with terms like “chalk” and “fade” indicating drivers who are going to be highly played, chalk, or those that we should avoid that week, fades. However, there are a few new ones to grasp a hold of to really excel at the sport.
Dominator Points - You will hear this term a lot throughout the season, especially at the races with more laps. It’s more of a thing for DraftKings but it still holds weight for FanDuel as well. In NASCAR scoring you get points for having your drivers lead laps or get fastest laps throughout the races and the two categories combined are what we call dominator points. They are points that can only go to a single driver for each lap and drivers that rack up those points typically dominate the races so hence, dominator points.
Position Differential or Place Differential - The word position or place is interchangeable here and you will see it abbreviated PD most weeks. It’s a simple measure of how many places a driver moved up by the time the race ends. So if a driver starts 25th and finishes 10th, they’ve picked up 15 spots of PD and on DraftKings that’s worth 15 points and on FanDuel that’s 7.5. However, if your driver starts 10th and finishes 25th, they would lose those same amounts of points on each site so we have to be careful as to who we target for this because it can make a big difference in your total points.
Average Driver Rating - This is a stat that is comparable to the idea of Passer Rating or QBR in the NFL in that it is designed to show exactly how well a driver performed in that race or span of races using a formula. A perfect rating is 150 for any given race and anything over 100 is excellent. So when looking at the stats for the week, guys with higher driver ratings are ones we’ll typically favor in certain builds.
If you follow along with our content all year, or ask in chat, you will surely get a hang of it pretty quickly and discover that there are several ways to build a lineup for each race. One last thing though, “stacking” isn’t a big part of NASCAR except for a few races a year like Daytona and Talladega but we’ll catch you up on that as the season progresses.
Schedule Changes
NASCAR is known as the sport where left turns are dominant and going around in the proverbial “circle” is expected, but that couldn’t be further from the truth, especially this season. The first thing that has changed this year is the schedule. Road courses had previously only taken up two spots in the schedule a year until the Roval came in three years ago and upped it to three, that’s been more than doubled this year. Seven road layouts have graced the NASCAR Cup schedule this year including a few new ones for the top series including a couple of new oval layouts too.
Circuit of the Americas (COTA) - A long-wanted addition to the NASCAR schedule, the state-of-the-art road course in Austin, Texas has hosted IndyCar and F1 races the last few years and now the Cup cars will go around the same 3.41-mile, 20-turn layout their F1 counterparts do.
Road America - Xfinity Series fans are familiar with this gem of a road course in Wisconsin as it’s been a yearly stop for that series for a while but the Cup series hasn’t been there in a very long time. That will change this year with a Fourth of July date at the 4-mile, 14-turn track that should provide quite the test for rookies and vets alike.
Indianapolis Motor Speedway Road Course - We saw this one debut with the Xfinity Series last year and it was a phenomenal race with perhaps the best finish all year. It’s replacing the standard, and frankly boring, Brickyard 400 that had just gotten to ho-hum to keep it’s date. The Indy road course will be a great challenge for all drivers as it is known as one of the best road layouts in the world.
Bristol Dirt - You read that right, dirt. For the first time since the early-70s the Cup drivers will go racing on a dirt track in a points-paying race and while Bristol Motor Speedway has a dirt track on the premises, this is actually the concrete half-mile track being covered in dirt. No one knows what to expect here but we should certainly get ready to see more sliding and drifting through the corners than we’ve seen in a very long time.
Nashville Superspeedway - This is a brand new track to the Cup schedule after it had been run by the lower series a couple of decades ago. It’s a 1.33-mile concrete track south of Nashville that has fairly shallow corners and will drive like no other track on the schedule despite having some elements of multiple tracks like the surface of Bristol and Dover and the length of Darlington and the shallowness of some of the 1.5-mile tracks as well.
Driver Changes
This offseason was set up to be one of the biggest “Silly Seasons” there’s been in a while, Silly Season being the nickname for the NASCAR offseason. There were quite a lot of free agent drivers and some teams that were rumored to be starting or ending and everything in between. Let’s take a look at who’s driving where this year.
Rookies:
Anthony Alfredo - #38 Front Row Motorsports
Chase Briscoe - #14 Stewart Haas Racing
Old Face New Places:
Christopher Bell - From #95 Leavine Family Racing to #20 Joe Gibbs Racing
Alex Bowman - From #88 Hendrick Motorsports to #48 Hendrick Motorsports
Ross Chastain - From Xfinity to #42 Chip Ganassi Racing
Ty Dillon - Will race part-time with #96 Gaunt Brothers Racing
Erik Jones - From #20 Joe Gibbs Racing to #43 Richard Petty Motorsports
Corey LaJoie - From #32 Go Fas Racing to #7 Spire Motorsports
Kyle Larson - From #42 (4 races) Chip Ganassi Racing to #5 (formerly #88) Hendrick Motorsports
John Hunter Nemechek - Moving to Truck Series
Daniel Suarez - From #96 Gaunt Brothers Racing to #99 Trackhouse Racing (New team)
Bubba Wallace - From #43 Richard Petty Motorsports to #23 23XI Racing (New team)
Retired:
Clint Bowyer
Jimmie Johnson
Matt Kenseth
Ryan Preece may run only 24 races this year based on current sponsorship levels.
We will be going over more in-depth about the changes on the Preseason podcast as well.
Season-Long Contests
There are a few different ways to do season-long NASCAR contests nowadays. The most popular ways to do it is to setup a pool with some friends or colleagues on one of the DFS sites and play each week with the highest score at the end of the season winning the pool. I’m in one of those myself this year in which we paid an entry fee at the beginning and each week consists of whatever lineup I’d usually play in other contests and at the end of the year we’re doing a GPP-style payout. We also have Dash 4 Cash races in there as well just like the Xfinity and Truck Series do throughout their seasons.
Another popular way to play is to do the NASCAR free contests in which you pick a roster of drivers each week and have a garage driver as well that you can move into your starting lineup but until the start of stage three in case one of your active drivers crashes or has trouble. The catch with that one is that you can only use a driver up to a certain number of times throughout the season with the cap being 10. You can create your own leagues in that and overall scores from each league also qualify for small weekly prizes to the NASCAR fan shop.
The final season-long way I enjoy playing is a contest called the Salary Cap Challenge on fantasyracingonline.com. It’s a $30 entry fee for the whole season, per team and you can enter multiple teams, with the idea being that you have a team of eight drivers for the full season and those drivers have to stay under the salary cap of $1,500. One driver is the All-Star who costs twice as much, but also gives twice as many points, and seven regular cars. You only get three chances to swap a driver out the whole year and you only have up until the 19th race of the year to make the changes. Each change has to keep you under the salary cap as well. The prizes are paid out at the end of the year based on total points for the full year with the top-80 places getting a percentage of the pot and there being weekly payouts for the highest scoring lineup that week. It’s quite fun to try and get drivers who are consistent throughout the year or specialize in certain disciplines that will be used throughout the year.