NASCAR

Daily Fantasy NASCAR Track Preview: NASCAR Cup Series Championship

With the NASCAR Cup Series Championship in Phoenix, practice and qualifying are back on the menu. How should that alter our approach for NASCAR DFS?

We've got a lot of moving pieces in place this weekend for the NASCAR Cup Series Championship at Phoenix.

1. It's the championship. That's kind of a big deal!

2. Although only four drivers are eligible for the championship, it's still a full field this week.

3. Because it's the championship, practice and qualifying are back.

We've got a lot of ground to cover in terms of how this impacts our NASCAR DFS lineups. Let's start with the schedule and go from there.

The Weekend Schedule

The lone practice session of the week will be Friday afternoon at 4 pm Eastern. Given Phoenix's short length, we can expect both single-lap times and five-lap averages out of most relevant drivers.

That's valuable intel to have. We just want to make sure we don't toss everything else out the window in favor of the practice data.

We've had practice sessions for three non-drafting oval races this year: the Bristol dirt race, Charlotte, and Nashville. At Bristol, the practice portion of my model had a lower correlation with each driver's finish than both their concrete Bristol history and their current form. At Charlotte, the practice portion lagged behind current form but edged out track history. In Nashville, with no track history to lean on, the practice data was the best segment of my model.

In other words, other data still matters. We should still look at how drivers have performed previously in Phoenix and at other short, flat tracks this year. Practice data is good, but it's not the end-all, be-all.

Qualifying will take place Saturday night. This will be the first time during the playoffs where the championship contenders haven't been locked into the front of the field. That does matter quite a bit. Let's delve into why.

The Championship Four

Sunday's race is 312 laps long, giving us 31.2 FanDuel points for laps led. That's a healthy number. If history is any indication, we should expect the championship contenders to be the top candidates to rack them up.

This will be the eighth championship race in Cup Series history. A driver in the championship four has won each of the previous seven. In six of those, another championship contender finished runner-up.

Last year was the first championship race in Phoenix, which could have made things more extreme, as it is a shorter track than the previous setup in Homestead. But in that one, the four championship contenders swept the top four spots.

Assuming the championship four will run out front isn't just based on those trends, though. In nine races at tracks shorter than 1.1 miles, here are the drivers who have led the most laps this year.

DriverLaps Led
Denny Hamlin885
Chase Elliott529
Kyle Larson524
Martin Truex Jr.427


Those happen to be the championship four. Turns out good drivers are good. Shocking!

It's possible we see this trend broken on Sunday. NASCAR races are volatile beasts. But our baseline assumption should be that these are our likely lap-leaders for DFS.

Last year's perfect FanDuel lineup for Phoenix included two championship drivers, both of whom started on the front row. That means we can be in on the championship drivers even if they have no place-differential upside due to the length of the race.

We can also be in on them even if they don't qualify well. If you're fast enough, you can make passes at Phoenix. Kyle Larson made 145 green-flag passes at Phoenix in the spring, working his way from the back to the front three separate times. It's also a long race, meaning they've got time to work their way forward and still contend to lead laps.

The one caveat here is that we should likely have at least one driver starting at the front in each lineup. Because Phoenix is a shorter track, if someone grabs the lead early, they can rack up points in a hurry. We want a "wave one" driver who can lead laps early as a result. But we can feel free to use a "wave two" driver as long as they've got the speed to work their way forward.

Our default build this week should be to include two championship contenders in each lineup. They're the most likely winners and lap-leaders, two things we need desperately. It'll certainly cost you as all four have FanDuel salaries of $13,000 or higher, but it's worth it.

For the value plays, we may have more leeway to get place-differential. We just don't want to force it.

In last year's championship race, three drivers who started 23rd or lower made the perfect lineup. That was with no qualifying.

With qualifying in place in the spring race of 2020, nobody in the perfect lineup started lower than 18th. Both of these outcomes are possible.

Phoenix is a (relatively) low-variance track, and we should expect that to be more true this week as championship races tend to be pretty clean. Without calamity, it's harder for slower cars (the ones most likely to qualify poorly) to finish well.

That's why we should hunt out place-differential only if we have confidence that the drivers starting further back have the speed to move through the pack. We may not get that, in which case we'll likely be peppering the teens with our value plays. But if someone slips in qualifying despite having a good record on short, flat tracks this season, then we can feel free to take advantage.

We certainly do have a lot up in the air this week given the unique circumstances and the return of practice and qualifying. But our core tenets remain the same: we need laps led out of our studs and quality finishes out of our value plays. We should have a good idea of what to expect in both categories, making Phoenix a pretty straightforward race from a DFS perspective.