I. Continued Unknowns - I hate to repeat myself from week to week, because I think it shows a lack of creativity, BUT so far this season every week has been just as chaotic and new. 6 races, 6 winners, 3 of which have been first-time winners, 1 of which was a brand-new team.
II. More Chaos = More entertainment - NASCAR has long been the victim of their own doing. The races are too long, but they serve a purpose of building variability into the race. You can complain about it all you want, but you’ll still spend 8-hours watching RedZone on NFL Sunday’s. Ultimately, if every race finishes like the one last week it won’t matter how long the race is.. you’ll always leave the fan entertained.
III. More New - Similar to the points above, this is another repeating point of this year. Every race has been a new style or different track type, and this week is more of the same. Today’s Richmond race is the first short track race of the year (the coliseum doesn’t count), and I’m very interested to see how she turns out. The Richmond races of the past few years have been absolute snoozers…. Some of the worst races on the calendar. But, with this new car, as we’ve seen, I hope we are in for an old-school Richmond race.
Good news is next week is Martinsville, so it’ll be our first true repeat track type!
IV. DFS craziness - the setup for this week is crazy for those in the DFS space. Introduce the unknowns, and what we’ve talked about above, with new teams seemingly dominating so far this season, new drivers on the cusp of winning, and the dominate drivers of the past starting deep in the field… we’re in for a wild DFS time in NASCAR. The old throwing darts at a board trick may work out for you today.
Here are some stats:
The winner of short track races have, on average:
Led 25% of the laps and had 16% of the fastest laps
The winner of the last 2 Richmond races have, on average:
Led 2.5% and 20%, and had 7.6% and 11.8% of the fastest laps
Last 2 winners: Alex Bowman & Martin Truex Jr.
But anyways… here’s the sheet:
