NASCAR DFS: Wise Power 400 Track Breakdown

Where are we racing again? Oh right, Auto Club Speedway. It’s easy to forget that NASCAR still races at Auto Club given that it’s been two years since they’ve raced at the track due Covid  in both 2020 and 2021. The Wise Power 400 ends that drought this Sunday.

Given that it’s been a minute, as the kids say, since the Cup cars have been on track here, let’s dive into the track layout a bit more than normal. It’s a 2-mile track, one of two on the schedule, and a pseudo-sister track to Michigan International Speedway. I say pseudo-sister because the distance and them both being D-shaped ovals are the only commonalities between the two tracks. Auto Club is a shallower track than you might expect with the turns banked at just 14 degrees and the front stretch tilted at 11 degrees. Compare that to a steeper Michigan and you’ll see a difference right away. This is also a higher-wear track for tires than most other intermediate tracks. Yes, we can still consider this an intermediate. It’s not quite on par with the old pavement of Atlanta but it’s similar to a Darlington surface. NASCAR has also been running the tire dragon on the track this week to increase the wear since it hasn’t been raced on for two years. The shallower layout of this 2-mile track often leads to more passing and more time out of the throttle here than other similar tracks.

Strategy Notes

Last week, we were stacking the back and letting the wrecks play out. That’s not how we’re approaching this week. The first thing that sticks out this week, is that laps led will matter here. With 200 scheduled laps on Sunday, there are 140 dominator points up for grabs on DraftKings. Some of those will be cheapies under caution, but that’s still a nice amount of points to target. We also won’t be seeing pack racing this week either. We’ll see a lot of single-file racing here with passes coming one car at a time and a lot less drafting. The second thing to keep in mind is that tire wear will be a factor here. It always is. When we’re parsing the field for drivers to play this week, we’ll want to look at average finishes and Green Flag Speed over the last several similar high tire-wear tracks. As luck would have it, that’s just what the Similar Races table shows. We saw tires be an issue at Daytona last week and get ready for them to be an issue this week as well. The 18” tires that the Cup cars are using this year can’t run inner liners. The sidewalls are too shallow. What does this mean? Instead of having the equivalents of run flats on the cars, they just pop like balloons now. If a car needs a tow back to the garage, for any reason, they are out of the race.

Schedule Notes

This weekend is a compressed schedule, known as a two-day show. Cup cars will be on track for Practice on Saturday afternoon which will bleed into Qualifying before the race on Sunday. That means that we’ll be getting info about how cars look all at once the day before the race. Expect some issues with tech inspection on Sunday as well as NASCAR will be strict early in the year to make sure teams aren’t bending the rules with the new cars. That could shake up DFS values as well.

Facts To Know This Week

• Ford was a popular car last weekend but they’ve only one once at Auto Club since 2009.
• The more comparable races here are the ones from 2016-2018 as they were high-horsepower and low-downforce cars like current ones are.
• 60-percent of drivers that have finished in the top-10 in the last five races here have started inside the top-12.
• During the 2016-18 races, an average of 7.3 drivers a race posted double-digit position differentials.
• In each of the last five races here, one driver in each race has led 100 or more laps and three times, two drivers have topped 50 laps led each.
• As for Fastest Laps, an average of 5.2 drivers per race reach double-digit fast laps in that same span.
• In the last four races here, six drivers have finished in the top-10 three times each and five of those have average Driver Ratings over 100.

Last 5 Race Stats
The table below shows the number of drivers to reach each stat-type over the last five Auto Club races with Race 1 being the most recent.

For the tables below:

• The DFS Scoring Table: Race 1 is the most recent race in the sample size with Race 5 being the earliest. We are using the Last 5 Auto Club races for the data.
• The Similar Races table: The data is comprised of stats from the last 12 races across Auto Club, Atlanta, Darlington, and Homestead.
• The drivers with * next to their names in the Last 4 Races table are showing their Xfinity stats for Auto Club.
• NEW - The Weekly Track Stats table shows the averages for each stat shown based on starting spot. The data goes includes every race at this week’s track since 2012.