The Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series will take a week off before traveling to Talladega Superspeedway for the Geico 500. It is a new era for NASCAR at Talladega. The restrictor-plates are gone. The cars will run the 550 HP engines with the 2” splitter, 8” spoiler and aero ducts. NASCAR hopes this provides better racing for the fans. We will see how it all plays out. The race can be seen Sunday at 2 p.m. ET on Fox.
It will be a unique schedule for the MENCS this week. There will be two practices Friday. The first practice will be Friday at 1:35 p.m. ET (No TV). Final practice is Friday at 4:35 p.m. ET (FS1). Qualifying will be Saturday at 4:40 p.m. ET (Fox). There will be no Garage Talk Notes for this race since practice speeds do not mean much at Talladega and the information from the garage is limited.
My early week pick for the pole is Kurt Busch. He has not been very good at qualifying this season, but Busch is coming of a second-place starting position at Richmond and this is not an ordinary track. Busch won the pole for the last race at Talladega and he qualified second in the spring race last year. The Chevy’s have been fast in Q-trim so I will go with the No. 1 car for the No. 1 position this week.
Each week I use different stats in my model to create the best rankings possible to give you an edge on the completion. This week I used driver rankings from Talladega, average finishing position at Talladega, average finishing position on Superspeedways, driver rankings on Superspeedways and accident avoidance (How few DNFs each driver has) to determine the rankings.
Here are the early week driver rankings for Talladega…
|
Driver |
| 1. Joey Logano |
| 2. Ricky Stenhouse |
| 3. Kevin Harvick |
| 4. Denny Hamlin |
| 5. Aric Almirola |
| 6. Brad Keselowski |
| 7. Kyle Busch |
| 8. Kurt Busch |
| 9. Jimmie Johnson |
| 10. Alex Bowman |
| 11. Ryan Blaney |
| 12. Chase Elliott |
| 13. William Byron |
| 14. Paul Menard |
| 15. Erik Jones |
| 16. Kyle Larson |
| 17. Daniel Suarez |
| 18. Clint Bowyer |
| 19. Ty Dillon |
| 20. Ryan Newman |
| 21. David Ragan |
| 22. Matt DiBenedetto |
| 23. Darrell Wallace Jr. |
| 24. Martin Truex Jr. |
| 25. Michael McDowell |
| 26. Austin Dillon |
| 27. Chris Buescher |
| 28. Ryan Preece |
| 29. Tyler Reddick |
| 30. Daniel Hemric |
| 31. Brendan Gaughan |
| 32. Landon Cassill |
| 33. Matt Tifft |
| 34. Ross Chastain |
| 35. Parker Klingerman |
| 36. Corey LaJoie |
| 37. Gray Gaulding |
* I will post my final driver rankings Saturday night (April 27th).
**Stats from Driveraverages.com and NASCAR Media. Career stats from Racing-Reference.Info…
*** Photos from NASCAR Media
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