NASCAR DFS: Ruoff Mortgage 500k Track Breakdown

The fourth race of the year is upon us with the Ruoff Mortgage 500 at Phoenix Raceway. The last race of the West Coast swing and one that is likely to be very exciting with this new car. Phoenix is one of the more unique tracks on the schedule with a “dogleg” portion of the front straight in which drivers can take advantage of the very wide kink in the track and try and pick up positions or gain time on their laps. It’s also one of the flattest tracks on the schedule with banking of just 12 degrees at most, and only on a part of the track. So the flatness combined with the wide corners at both ends of the layout make for a bit of a free-for-all in the higher horsepower, lower downforce packages here.

We’ve continued to see a lot of parity in the races this year. That should be the case again this week too. In terms of comparable tracks to Phoenix, we’re looking at New Hampshire and Richmond as similar tracks with similar styles of driving.

You can also listen to this week's Podcast with Dan Malin and myself talking strategy and drivers.

Strategy Notes

Even though this track isn’t technically in the standard definition of a short track, we can treat it like one for DFS. There are a fair bit of laps, passing for the lead can be hard, and cars can be lapped relatively easily — all the criteria of a short track. The race name has 500k in the moniker but that’s not for 500 miles, nope — rather 500 kilometers which equals 312 miles. With 312 laps in this race, laps led will be a factor, as will fastest laps. Looking at the last five, non-championship, races, there has been one driver to lead more than 100 laps in four of those races. As for it being hard to pass here, in four of the last five races here there have been four or fewer drivers to move up double-digit spots. In the fifth race there were 11 such drivers, which could happen this week but that’ll depend on qualifying. If you look below, I’ve added another data point to the Last Five Race table — Lead Lap Finishers. That shows there were three races with 15 or 16 cars to finish on the lead lap, again just like a short track. One concern here is the tires holding up after restarts as drivers go from banking to the flat back to banking in the dogleg. We’ve seen tires blow out each week, this one won’t be any different. Over the last five, non-championship, races, just 38-percent of top-10 finishers have started outside of the top-10 indicating that track position matters here, just like a short track.

Facts To Know:

• Only one driver in the field has a top-five rate of 75-percent in the last eight races here
• Five drivers in the field have a top-10 rate of 75-percent in the last eight races here
• Eight drivers have average Driver Ratings of over 100 in the last eight races as well
• JGR drivers have won four of the last five non-championship races here
• Three drivers in the field have averaged a PD over five in the last eight races
• Coming into this race, there have been 25 different drivers to finish in the top-10 through the three races this year, the most since 1973
• No more than four drivers have led more than 50 laps in a single race here in the last five non-title races

Last Five Race Stats

The table below shows the number of drivers to reach each stat-type over the last five, non-championship, Phoenix 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 Phoenix races for the data.
• The Similar Races table: The data is comprised of stats from the last 15 (five each) races across New Hampshire, Phoenix, and Richmond.
• 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.