Las Vegas Motor Speedway is home to all three NASCAR series this weekend being capped off with the Pennzoil 400. Sunday’s race is expected to be an exciting one in Vegas. It won’t be without a lot of chatter about who won the truck race last night nor the Chase Elliott injury and subsequent surgery. NASCAR Raceday will surely be talking about it all weekend as well as Josh Berry but for us, how does that all effect our DFS strategy and top plays for the Pennzoil 400? We’ll dive into that if you keep reading.
Chase Elliott Suffers Leg Injury Friday
The most popular driver in the Cup Series will be out for several weeks due to a fractured tibia he suffered while snowboarding on Friday in Colorado. For Sunday’s Pennzoil 400, Josh Berry gets the call to drive the number-9 Hendrick Chevy following him running the Xfinity Series race on Saturday. Going forward it will likely be a rotation of drivers from the JRM team that fills the 9-car seat.
What Tracks Are Similar To Las Vegas Motor Speedway
If we’re looking at similar tracks for researching the Pennzoil 400, there are a few that come to mind. In general, we’re looking at high-speed, low-to-medium tire wear intermediate tracks on the schedule. That group includes Kansas, Texas, Charlotte, and Michigan in addition to studying Las Vegas. Those tracks offer similar setups and racing style to Vegas, with all aside from Kansas being fairly track position dependent.
Pennzoil 400 Top Plays and DFS Strategy
This track, like most intermediates is going to be a track where we need dominator points to really get up in the standings. What are dominator points? They’re laps led and fastest laps on DraftKings and laps led on FanDuel. This is a race with 267 laps for the full distance which should give us the chance to have at least one driver lead 100 or more laps. However, if we look at similar tracks a year ago with the Next Gen car, the races rarely saw a driver crack 100 laps led in a race. This means we want to come up with a mix of one and two dominator builds. Vegas has been a track where track position has ruled over the last 10 races here with all but three winners coming from the top-10 starting spots and two of the three that didn’t started P13. You can pass further back in the field but PD might be limited some if a driver is starting too far back.
Pennzoil 400 Practice and Qualifying Results
Following practice and qualifying sessions for the Pennzoil 400, here’s how the field lines up and where they ran in practice for each metric. Also added in are average finish for each driver over the last several Vegas races and similar races.
| Driver | DK$ | FD $ | Avg. Prac to Qual | Qual | 1-Lap | 5-Lap | 10-lap | Track Avg. Fin | Sim Avg. Fin |
| Joey Logano | $10,500 | $12,500 | -4 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 7 | 7.5 | 10.8 |
| William Byron | $9,100 | $9,500 | 0 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 14.3 | 16.2 |
| Ryan Blaney | $9,700 | $11,000 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 14.9 | 18.4 |
| Ty Gibbs | $6,600 | $6,000 | -11 | 4 | 8 | 24 | 14 | 22.0 | 20.7 |
| Kyle Busch | $10,900 | $14,000 | -23 | 5 | 27 | 28 | 7.0 | 13.4 | |
| Kyle Larson | $10,700 | $13,500 | 4 | 6 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 11.0 | 10.3 |
| Brad Keselowski | $7,700 | $6,500 | -13 | 7 | 22 | 18 | 9.4 | 17.2 | |
| Ross Chastain | $10,300 | $13,000 | 1 | 8 | 10 | 7 | 5 | 20.3 | 10.5 |
| Austin Cindric | $7,100 | $5,000 | -6 | 9 | 11 | 15 | 18 | 24.0 | 21.6 |
| Christopher Bell | $9,300 | $10,000 | -3 | 10 | 12 | 19 | 9 | 22.0 | 19.6 |
| Alex Bowman | $8,500 | $8,200 | -2 | 11 | 16 | 11 | 13 | 12.1 | 11.9 |
| Denny Hamlin | $9,900 | $12,000 | -5 | 12 | 23 | 17 | 12 | 10.9 | 8.5 |
| Bubba Wallace | $8,300 | $8,000 | 6 | 13 | 6 | 9 | 23.5 | 19.6 | |
| Kevin Harvick | $8,600 | $8,500 | 8 | 14 | 7 | 5 | 6 | 9.6 | 11.8 |
| Martin Truex Jr | $9,500 | $10,500 | -8 | 15 | 25 | 25 | 20 | 7.3 | 10.5 |
| Ricky Stenhouse Jr | $6,800 | $4,800 | -5 | 16 | 24 | 21 | 19 | 16.3 | 18.6 |
| Michael McDowell | $5,700 | $4,000 | 2 | 17 | 17 | 13 | 16 | 24.4 | 19.7 |
| Chris Buescher | $6,900 | $6,200 | 11 | 18 | 4 | 8 | 8 | 16.4 | 20.8 |
| Corey Lajoie | $5,200 | $3,500 | -9 | 19 | 28 | 27 | 25.5 | 22.4 | |
| Chase Briscoe | $7,400 | $7,000 | 2 | 20 | 14 | 23 | 18.5 | 17.7 | |
| Aric Almirola | $6,400 | $5,500 | 15 | 21 | 9 | 6 | 3 | 17.4 | 20.8 |
| Erik Jones | $7,900 | $6,800 | 10 | 22 | 15 | 12 | 10 | 19.4 | 18.0 |
| AJ Allmendinger | $6,100 | $4,500 | 10 | 23 | 13 | 10 | 17 | 9.0 | 16.0 |
| Daniel Suarez | $7,600 | $7,500 | 5 | 24 | 18 | 20 | 23.8 | 17.6 | |
| Noah Gragson | $6,300 | $5,800 | -7 | 25 | 32 | 32 | 11.0 | 21.1 | |
| Austin Dillon | $8,100 | $7,200 | -2 | 26 | 31 | 30 | 22 | 14.3 | 11.5 |
| Justin Haley | $5,900 | $4,200 | 9 | 27 | 21 | 16 | 23.0 | 20.4 | |
| Todd Gilliland | $5,100 | $3,000 | 2 | 28 | 26 | 26 | 24.0 | 23.5 | |
| JJ Yeley | $4,600 | $2,000 | -5 | 29 | 34 | 33 | 32.4 | 30.0 | |
| Cody Ware | $4,900 | $2,000 | 0 | 30 | 33 | 34 | 23 | 30.2 | 28.0 |
| Ryan Preece | $7,200 | $5,200 | 12 | 31 | 19 | 22 | 15 | 25.2 | 35.0 |
| Josh Berry | $8,000 | 6 | 32 | 29 | 29 | 21 | |||
| Ty Dillon | $5,400 | $2,500 | 3 | 33 | 30 | 31 | 22.3 | 21.0 | |
| Tyler Reddick | $8,800 | $9,000 | 34 | 16.2 | 20.7 | ||||
| Harrison Burton | $5,600 | $3,000 | 20 | 35 | 20 | 14 | 11 | 21.0 | 22.4 |
| BJ McLeod | $4,700 | $2,000 | 1 | 36 | 35 | 31.8 | 27.2 |
Stacks
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