Traditionally, the Folds of Honor Quiktrip 500 is a fairly predictable race. At least from the style of racing. This is not what we’re getting with this year’s edition. The track has been fully repaved, for the first time in more than 20 years, and it’s been reconfigured. What does that mean for the racing? No one is quite sure. All we can go on is what the drivers have said and what the racing has been like in practice and the other races this weekend.
Those practices and races have produced racing that is similar to what we’ve seen at Daytona for a while now. That is to say, 2-by-2 pack racing for the most part, but perhaps less chaos. Why less chaos? Ricky Stenhouse Jr. stated it well in a post-practice interview when he said that holding the draft isn’t the most important thing here. They can let off the gas and not lose the draft unlike at Daytona. That means there are evasive maneuvers drivers can use to avoid the typical crashes at plate races.
All that being said, it’s likely to be very close to Daytona in which drivers will switch the lead fairly frequently and the fastest laps will come from inside the pack more than from the lead drivers. Position differential will be quite important for high-scoring lineups but with 334 laps in the race, we can’t rule out the benefit of having a driver that can hold the lead well. Most of this week I have advocated building lineups in a 50-50 manner in which some are geared toward plate race builds and others are geared toward intermediate builds. That hasn’t really changed all that much but we’re not doing a full stack of the back for the plate builds like we normally would. This is also a week to play light since it’s so unpredictable and we have no real data to pull from like we normally do.
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