DFS NASCAR PICKS TALLADEGA – Fantasy Racing Tips

The NASCAR Cup Series will compete at Talladega Superspeedway Sunday. My picks for the Superspeedways have been very successful in the past but the cat is out of the bag. The days of simply selecting the good drivers who start outside the top-25 with the best chance of finishing inside the top-15 are over. Those drivers are now highly owned so it makes it more difficult to finish at the top of our contests if we simply use that lineup construction strategy. I will be making a few changes to my strategy and hope for a little luck in the GEICO 500.

CUP SERIES STATS ON SUPERSPEEDWAYS

I am not going to be cute and try to pretend I can predict the finishing order at Talladega. There is just too much randomness in this race and each driver in the field has a decent chance for a top-10 finish Sunday. There are some drivers who are better at Superspeedway racing than others though. We can find these drivers by looking at how each driver ran in the two Superspeedway races this year (Daytona and Atlanta) and the two races last year at Talladega. Here are the Driver Ratings and DFS Points for the drivers in those races…

DRAFTKINGS STRATEGY

The race at Talladega is 188 laps (500 miles) in length. That means there will be 47 bonus points for leading laps and 84.6 points available for fastest laps in DraftKings contests. The trend at Talladega is for six drivers to lead over 10 laps in this race, so the laps led get spread throughout the field. The drivers in the back score most of the fastest laps and that takes away from the dominators value too. We do not need to worry about dominator points this week.

DRAFTKINGS TOURNAMENT CONTEST STRATEGY

ALL DRIVERS ARE IN PLAY AT TALLADEGA! Anything can and does happen in this race so there is no need to post a list of core drivers. This race is all about lineup construction strategies. Here are the strategies that have won 9 of the last 10 DraftKings Contests at Talladega…

– Select no more than one driver who starts inside the top-10, but none who start in the top-5. (You can fade the top-10 in 50% of your lineups)

– Select one driver who starts between 11^th – 19^th (Can start 2 drivers in this range if your fade the top-10)

– Select 3 drivers who start between 20^th -30^th

– Select 1 driver who starts outside the top-31

– Average salary spent on winning lineup is $46,700

– Do not own more than 25% of any driver in your lineup builds

If you follow these strategies, you should win some cash Sunday.

CASH CONTEST STRATEGY

We need to eliminate our risk in Cash Contests, so that means we need to pick drivers who start outside the top-20 and even outside the top-25. This strategy will work the best for the FanDuel Contests too.

DRAFTKINGS MODEL (Prediction Based on Stats)