Daily Fantasy NASCAR Recap - Quaker State 400
Martin Truex Jr. was at it again last night. I talked about his dominance of the 1.5 mile intermediates in an earlier article and he didn't make me look bad Saturday night in Kentucky. Kyle Busch had the short run for most of the night but Truex was right there every time the #18 started to fall off. Truex won the first two stages in the race and now has 13 stage wins for the season. To put that into perspective, no other driver has five stage wins and Joe Gibbs Racing as a four car team has just seven stage wins. Then it comes to DraftKings, which is the reason we are all here in the first place. Right? Well, Truex picked 127 points on Saturday night bring his already absurd average up to 99.4 DK points per race on the 1.5 mile tracks. To get access to the complete DraftKings points trends be sure to grab a copy of the sheet at the bottom of the article.
I listed Kyle Busch as my second Dominator Pick in the article and he he didn't disappoint with a Top 5 finish and 87.5 DK points(3rd most). He was dominating early on leading 112 laps but couldn't pull off the win and still remains winless in the 2017 season. The finish on the final restart could have had something to do with the team missing a lugnut on the last pit stop.
The chalk play of the week definitely paid off. Kyle Larson made his way through the field multiple times sticking to the bottom groove and eventually finished runner-up to Truex giving him eight Top 5 finishes on the season with his two wins. He and Truex are the only two drivers with 700+ points sitting 1 and 2 in the standings. Larson was also one of the four drivers I talked about in my track type article. He picked up 92.5 last night and is now averaging 57.5 points per intermediate race which trails only Truex, of course.
Ryan Newman turned out to be a bit of a bust as he was #15 in my overall ranks but ended up with the 19th most DK Points(29.0) as he finished 22nd.
Looking at the contrarian plays, Chase Elliott(18%) and Ryan Blaney(15%) didn't come with huge ownership discounts like I expected but Elliott sure paid off his salary with a third place finish and 52.5 DK points. He was #12 on my overall model and ended up finishing fourth so I will take that as a win. Blaney finished 14th in final DK points(34) after ranking 17th in the model and picked up his 7th Top 10 finish of the season.
My low-end value play also paid off in a big way. Landon Cassill was super cheap at just $5,500 and was #30 in the overall model and with 27.5 DK points, finished 20th overall this week. The best part was the ownership as David Ragan in the same range was over 12% more owned and finished with five less points.
Looking at the main cheatsheet this week, it was a much better performance than last week to say the least. The correlation end up at only .371 but the Top 3 all finished there at the end of the night. The biggest issue was that four of the Top 10 in the model(Johnson, Kurt Busch, Kenseth, Keselowski) all finished outside the Top 30 in DraftKings points. The good news is that 25 drivers outperformed their ranking in the model. Things are looking up and I am very excited to get started with research for the New Hampshire next weekend.
LINK TO DFS NASCAR TRENDS SHEET
