Welcome to the opening weekend of the NASCAR Cup season and one of the biggest races of the year across motorsports. The Daytona 500 is here in all it’s glory, and that includes for DFS with a Milly Maker on DK for the first time. With so much going on this week as the start of the season, we’ll dig into what’s changed since last year for the Cup series before we get into the weekly info, that you’ll see every week, in terms of strategy notes, the starting spot charts and the best drivers to play.

What’s New This Year…

  • All of the Cup cars are the Gen 7 cars which are a complete overhaul in just about every way from the previous car. We won’t go into all of the details but the tires, brakes, bodies, lug nuts, aerodynamics, and driving style have all changed. For Daytona, we shouldn’t see many changes to how the race happens though, but going forward there will be serious differences.
  • New Teams and expanding teams were the all of the offseason.
    • Trackhouse Racing: Bought Chip Ganassi Racing and brought Ross Chastain into the 1-car for a two-car team.
    • 23XI Racing: Brought in Kurt Busch to the 45-car to make a two-car team with Bubba Wallace in the 23-car.
    • Roush-Fenway-Keselowski Racing: RFK racing changed initials and drivers this year with Brad Keselowski coming as driver and part-owner taking over the 6-car from Ryan Newman. Matt McCall will be Keselowski’s Crew Chief, previously with Kurt Busch.
    • Team Penske: Penske replaced Brad Keselowski with Austin Cindric in the 2-car and brought in a new Crew Chief for Ryan Blaney.
    • Wood Brothers: Harrison Burton took over the 21-car from the departure of Matt DiBenedetto and brings Austin Cindric’s Xfinity Crew Chief with him to Cup.
    • Petty GMS Racing: Richard Petty Motorsports was bought and combined with GMS to make Petty GMS and make it a two-car team with the 43-car of Erik Jones joining the 42-car of Ty Dillon. Ty Dillon is back in a full-time role after missing last season in the Cup series.
    • Kaulig Racing: They will be a two-car team in the Cup Series with one full-time ride, the 31-car with Justin Haley, and the 16-car being a ride split between three drivers including Daniel Hemric and AJ Allmendinger.
    • Money Team Racing: A team backed by Floyd Mayweather, the 50-car, is attempting to be full-time team in 2022 but they don’t have a charter and will need to qualify for each race.

Strategy Notes

If you’ve listened to the podcast or read any of the content out this week for Cup or Xfinity or Truck, you’ll have noticed that Daytona is unlike most other races. That’s both a good and bad thing. On the good side, it means that basically all drivers are playable due to the unpredictable  nature of the racing. It also means that salaries aren’t a big concern either. In fact, it’s not uncommon to see winning lineups leave $7,000 or more on the table in salary. On the bad side, anything can happen here and no lead or winnings are safe until the checkered flag waves. This race also has you focusing on a completely different strategy than any other race this year.

When building lineups here, we want one driver in the top-10 of the starting grid and the rest to be 20 on back, if not 20-30. Just for clarification, drivers starting P30 or worse, bust (aka don’t hit value) nearly as often as those starting 20-30. Statistically, as you’ll see below, that gives you the best chance to max out the points. Laps Led aren’t really a consideration for the 500 as the lead changes so many times that banking on drivers getting dominator points almost never happens. Going back to the Track Breakdown, you’ll see that only twice in the last five races has a driver lead 50 or laps. On average 3.2 drivers a race lead 20 or more. So again, it doesn’t really matter.

While the playbook has been curated to give you the drivers with the best shots of scoring well for DFS, anyone is playable this week for the most part. So for this week, I’ll likely say I don’t have a problem with a lineup, but will still steer you in a bit of a better direction in Discord.

Average Points By Starting Spot

If you’re new here, these charts below are a staple of the playbook each week. They show the average points scored for each site by starting spot over the last five races at each week’s track, regardless of the driver that started there or why. It’s meant to show the strategy behind the builds for each race and not guarantee that that starting spot will score that point total again. The red line shows the average scored across all starting spots to give you an idea where each spot ranks.

Stacks

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