NASCAR DFS 4EVER 400 Playbook: Kyle Larson Looks To Dominate At Homestead

Homestead-Miami Speedway is playing host to the second race in the Round of 8 in the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs. The 4EVER 400 by Mobil 1 is set for Sunday at one of the best tracks on the schedule. Always known as a driver’s track, Homestead really puts the racing in the hands of the drivers rather than track position or engineers at the shop. Why is that? The design of the track, the progressive banking, the tire fall off. All of it. Given the way the Next Gen car has raced on mile-and-a-half tracks and how good this track always seems to be, this is setting up for a great race on Sunday at Homestead.

NASCAR DFS Strategy For 4EVER 400 At Homestead-Miami

Homestead-Miami has been on the NASCAR schedule since 1999. In those 24 races, it’s been an interesting mix of outcomes depending on what stats we’re looking at. If we want to focus on where the race winners are coming from, we need to look at the top-10. Why? Well, only thrice has the winner come from outside the top-20 and in 17-of-the-21 other races, the winner has started inside the top-10. However, we don’t necessarily need the race winner in our DFS lineups, though recommended to shoot for, in order for us to win. So what does it look like from a passing perspective? Well, Dan Malin and I talked about that on the podcast this week and the stats are pretty clear. Drivers can move up here, whether it be from passing on the track, pit strategies, cautions, or tire strategies. In the last five races, as you’ll see below, nearly half of the top-10 finishers started outside the top-12, and in most cases started well outside the top-12. For DFS purposes it doesn’t particularly matter how the drivers are finishing there, just that they are. If we’re looking at other tracks for performance indicators and history, which tracks are most similar to Homestead? Well, depends a bit who you ask. If you ask Goodyear, they’ll tell you that it’s most similar to Darlington for who they’re building their tires for this weekend. If you ask the drivers, they’ll tell you they think it’s its own track given the oval shape and tire wear and progressive banking. However, when we look at setups and stat samples, we’re looking at Auto Club, Darlington, Kansas, Homestead, and Vegas races in the Next Gen car. All of those tracks have multiple grooves and tire wear factors that make them similar to how Homestead races.

For Cash builds, we’re hunting 1-2 laps led dominators and the rest of the spots filled with big PD upside plays. That’s pretty similar to how we typically approach an intermediate track elsewhere. The difference here is that we can get away with just one dominator and five PD plays rather than a 2-4 mix.

For GPP builds, it’s a tad more nuanced than cash strategy. Clearly we’re looking for as many dominator points as we can get, but we’re also looking for as high of finishing positions as we can get too. At a 400-mile race, we’re needing drivers to hit as close to 6x value as possible, or average that across the lineup to really sit high on the payouts. How does that play out across a lineup? It means possibly going with two cheaper drivers to get another high-priced driver who can really rack up the dominator points and lots of finishing points.

Practice And Qualifying Results For Homestead NASCAR Race

The following table shows where each driver in the field, sorted by qualifying spot, ran at practice over the short and long run averages. It’s designed to show who may move up and who may be able to hold qualifying spots better than we think. Of course this is only part of the info to building lineups and you can read full analysis for the top picks below.

DraftKings Scoring Trends For Homestead

The following chart shows the DraftKings scoring averages by starting spot over the last five Homestead-Miami races. The idea is to show the strategy for building lineups and where the scoring comes from rather than be hard-and-fast rules for which spots score set numbers of points. The drivers, nor how/why they started there, factor into the scoring averages.

FanDuel Scoring Trends For Homestead

The following chart shows the FanDuel scoring averages by starting spot over the last five Homestead-Miami races. The idea is to show the strategy for building lineups and where the scoring comes from rather than be hard-and-fast rules for which spots score set numbers of points. The drivers, nor how/why they started there, factor into the scoring averages.

Stacks

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