Daily Fantasy NASCAR: Gander Outdoors 400 Track Preview

One of the unique challenges with daily fantasy NASCAR is that every track is different. Not only does this mean that certain drivers will perform better at one place than another, but each track will have different scoring tendencies than the previous one. That means we need to alter our strategies pretty drastically.

Each week here on numberFire, we're going to dig into the track that's hosting the upcoming weekend's race to see what all we need to know when we're setting our lineups. We'll have a separate piece that looks at drivers who have excelled there in the past; here, we just want to know about the track itself. Once qualifying has been completed, we'll also have a primer detailing which drivers fit this strategy and should be in your lineup for that week.

This week, the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series is starting the second round of the playoffs at Dover, a high-banked, one-mile, concrete car-cruncher. What do we need to know before filling out daily fantasy NASCAR lineups for the Gander Outdoors 400? Let's check it out.

Track Overview

Last week, laps led were an afterthought for DFS. With just 109 laps in the race at the Charlotte roval, they didn't give us much upside.

It's a whole new ballgame at Dover.

This time around, we get 400 laps, amounting to 40 points available for laps led on FanDuel. You can still get some upside via place differential to be certain, but laps led are going to be a focal point of our process.

Over the past 5 Dover races, 9 drivers have led at least 100 laps. Two of them topped the 200-laps-led barrier, generating 20 extra FanDuel points via that category alone. That's going to create some serious separation if you have them on your roster.

In each of these five races, there have been multiple drivers who have led at least 85 laps. The 2016 fall race featured 3 drivers who led 90 or more laps. And most of these drivers are starting at the front of the pack.

Of the 9 drivers to lead 100 or more laps, only 2 started outside the top 5. None of those drivers started lower than 12th, though Kyle Larson led 85 laps after starting 23rd. More often than not, if you want to snag the high-upside drivers, they're going to start at the front.

Because of this, we're going to want to make sure we do whatever we can to identify the drivers best positioned to rack up the laps led. We can do this by looking at 10-lap average speeds in practice, track history at Dover, and also how drivers have performed in Bristol, another high-banked concrete track. Once we do that, then we can start to focus on filling out the rest of our lineup.

But where do we go to get those other parts of our lineup? And how many lap-leaders do we need on each roster? Let's take a deeper look at those five races to find out.

Historic Scoring Trends

Before getting into roster construction, let's check out overall scoring trends at Dover in the past five races. The chart below shows the FanDuel-point output for each driver over this sample based on where they started the race.

This chart -- for the most part -- validates the discussion around the highest-upside drivers starting at the front. But it also illustrates that a second group of high-upside drivers can come from a bit deeper in the pack.

Of the 8 drivers to score at least 90 FanDuel points in this span, 4 started in the top 5, and 4 started between 10th and 23rd. The true top-end scores -- the 3 drivers to top 100 points -- all started at the front, but this second wave of drivers is noteworthy.

This second wave of high-scoring drivers starting between 10th and 23rd all finished either first or second in the race. One of them led 138 laps, and another led 85. But the other two -- both of whom won the race -- led just 48 and 7 laps in their event.

That formula gives us a template for handling drivers who start in that range. If it's a mid-tier driver starting seventh, they're not going to have a ton of upside. They're not likely to win the race, and they're not going to gain a ton of place-differential points to move the needle there. It'll be hard to palate that archetype of driver if they wind up qualifying there.

But if it's a top-end driver -- one with a shot to win the event -- we can absolutely roll the dice on them in this range. They won't have the same laps-led upside as their competitors at the front, but they can make up for that by getting finishing points and some place-differential points along the way.

The problem is that this driver is likely to be mighty costly, and we can't just flood our entire lineup with drivers priced at $12,000 and higher. At some point, we're going to need some lower-cost outlets. How do we find those?

For this, let's lower the threshold to those who scored 80 FanDuel points. In our sample, there are 27 drivers who have hit that mark; here's where they started.

As you can see, most of the drivers start toward the front. But there's a second blip up between 11th and 15th, and there were a good number of drivers starting 16th to 20th who made the cut. That's likely where we'll need to live in looking for our cheaper drivers.

Another way to view this is that we need to know which starting positions to target for our drivers who aren't likely to lead laps. Our cheaper drivers aren't getting upside through that; they're doing so via finishing well and getting place-differential points. Where do find drivers who can do this?

Let's take out all drivers who led more than 10 laps in our five-race sample and look at just drivers who got fewer than one FanDuel point for laps led. That pushes us even more toward drivers starting between 11th and 20th.

In the 5 races, 12 drivers have scored 80 or more FanDuel points without leading more than 10 laps. Eight of those 12 started between 11th and 19th with just 2 starting higher than that and the other two starting 26th or lower. The highest-upside drivers who don't lead laps come from this range between 11th and 20th.

But we can also get some value from deeper in the pack, allowing us to target drivers who struggle in qualifying. Clint Bowyer scored 79 points in 2016 by finishing 12th after starting 32nd. Trevor Bayne and Danica Patrick also topped the 75-point barrier even without a finish better than 10th by starting 25th or lower.

As such, if a mid-range driver struggles in qualifying and starts in the back, we should feel good targeting them if they have the ability to crank out a top-15 finish.

This gives us a pretty clear roster construction for the race. We should start out our lineups by snagging two drivers who we think have the ability to lead a bunch of laps. There will likely be two guys who get roughly nine or more points via laps led on Sunday, and they'll give us the separation from the pack that we need.

After that, we search for place-differential points. Most often, the fruitful ranges to find these will be drivers starting between 11th and 20th. But if we get a driver capable of logging a top-15 finish starting lower than that, we should be willing to take the dive on them, as well.

Finally, if we need to punt on one position in order to gain upside elsewhere, that's totally permissible here. There's enough carnage at Dover to push drivers who normally run in the 20s up around 15th, which can work for DFS. If someone priced between $5,000 and $7,000 starts around 30th and has the ability to finish somewhere near the top 15, they can certainly work for our rosters, getting us the extra juice to cram more laps led into our lineups.