NASCAR DFS Core Plays Daytona 500: Denny Hamlin Leads The Way

The 2023 Daytona 500 goes green on Sunday, February 19th and kicks off another season of NASCAR Cup Series racing. It’s also the first real shot at money for NASCAR DFS on DraftKings and FanDuel. In that vein and to help you set your lineups for both cash and GPP builds on both sites, we’re bringing back our Core Plays. And the first addition of those are for the Daytona 500!

Just what are core plays? Well, when Dan Malin and myself are building our lineups for each race, we approach our builds with a core of drivers. Then we fill in around those cores with some other drivers based on the tournament type and site. Rather than thinking about a full lineup at one time, we whittle down the driver pool to a handful of drivers that we feel strongly about that week and then fill out the few remaining spots with drivers we’re targeting for a specific reason. So why not give those cores to you to build around. The table below has the same cores that I’ve built my Daytona 500 DFS lineups around while getting exposure to a bunch of other drivers so I don’t have too much of any one driver.

The Core Plays table below should be read from left to right based on the site and game type you’re building for. They are not designed to add up to the salary cap nor are they designed to be plugged in as full lineups. Certain races they’ll be more for top-tier than the value-tier and vice versa and same goes for the mid-tier. It simply depends on the race and the setup of the field.

For more specific and in-depth analysis, check out the Daytona 500 Cup Playbook and the NASCAR DFS Podcast as well as asking questions in the NASCAR DFS Discord channel.

Daytona 500 NASCAR DFS Core Plays