Daily Fantasy NASCAR Track Preview: Verizon 200 at the Brickyard

It's definitely odd to talk about Indianapolis as being a "new" track for the NASCAR Cup Series. The track is one of the most historic sporting sites on the planet, and the Cup Series itself has been running there since 1994.

It's just a bit different this time around.

Instead of running the rectangle-shaped speedway, they'll be hooking right-hand turns and sprinting through the infield. It's the first time the Cup Series has run the road course, so while it's far from a "new" track, it is for our purposes in DFS.

As you know from the other four "new" tracks this year, this brings a unique schedule and some alterations for how we play DFS. Let's start with that schedule and then delve into the strategy.

Same-Day Qualifying

The 2019 race in Indianapolis had same-day qualifying, but it happened on the first Sunday of the NFL season. So at least this is better than that?

It's still a bummer. Qualifying for the race will take place beginning at 9 am Eastern and should be wrapped up by 10 am. Lock is at 1 pm Eastern, meaning we'll have a three-hour window to fill out lineups with all information in hand.

As we've discussed previously, how you handle this depends on your goal in playing DFS. If you want to have fun, feel free to play even if you're not around then. But if your goal is to profit and fill out +EV lineups, you need to carve out time between 10 am and 1 pm on Sunday to fill out lineups. If you're playing to win some cash, and you can't be around in that time slot, it's in your best interest to sit this week out. We'll discuss why in a second.

The minor consolation is that we will have at least some practice data from Saturday. The Cup Series will practice at 11 am Eastern then, giving us on-track times to look at. It's possible we could get some five-lap averages, too; in last year's Xfinity Series practice on the road course, 27 drivers ran at least five laps, though not necessarily consecutively. Laps at Indy take about 90 seconds to complete, much shorter than a lap at Road America (132 seconds) or COTA (133 seconds), meaning the odds we get impactful practice data are higher here than other first-time road courses thus far.

Accepting Place-Differential

For each of the first two road course races with qualifying this year, our strategy has been to accept place-differential points where we can find them. That's always the goal in a shorter race, and they'll run just 82 laps on Sunday. Road America showed the value of that, and it illustrated the importance of waiting until after qualifying to fill out lineups.

That qualifying session featured a pair of red flags, which stopped drivers mid-lap and prevented some from logging times at all. That put fast cars in the back of the pack, including Chase Elliott and Kyle Busch, two of the favorites entering the race (though Busch's lack of qualifying was due to a practice crash).

Those two drivers wound up on the podium, meaning that if they weren't in your lineups, you weren't cashing.

They weren't alone, either. Here's the perfect FanDuel lineup from that race.

Four of the five drivers started all the way in the back. The lone exception finished runner-up. If you had filled out a lineup before qualifying, you likely would have been on Elliott and Busch. But someone like Austin Dillon popped up fully due to his poor starting spot.

Is the same thing likely to happen this weekend? No. Drivers likely learned their lesson and will prioritize at least getting a lap in early in the session. But it could happen, and if it does, it'll be huge for DFS.

We saw something similar at COTA, even with qualifying being less chaotic (though it did take place in the rain). There, three of five drivers in the perfect lineup started 20th or lower. The other two started near the front but finished on the podium.

This gives us a simple formula for finding quality drivers. If someone starts in the back, they're going to be a rockstar-level DFS play if you think they can finish in the top 10. If they're starting higher in the pack, you need them to push for a top-five. If a driver doesn't fit in either of those buckets, they're an easy cross-off.

That's why we lean on the "accept place-differential where you can find it" creed. If it becomes available to us -- like it did in Road America -- you need to shovel as much of it into your lineup as possible. If not -- as we saw with the studs at COTA -- then we can still target drivers closer to the front. They just need the upside to finish top-five.

So, yes, it is a bummer to have to take time on Sunday to fill things out. Filling out lineups earlier in the week has been one massive upside of the lack of qualifying. But it does give us a potential for an edge.

There are going to be lineups in the pool that don't account for qualifying. If you do account for it, your lineups will be better than those. It's getting tougher and tougher to find DFS slates where we still have an edge over the crowd, but we will get that this weekend. We should be inclined to take advantage, accept place-differential options when they're presented to us, and hope things break the way they did last month at Road America.