NASCAR DFS Playbook Go Bowling At The Glen: Top DraftKings and Fanduel DFS Picks
Published: Aug 21, 2022
The penultimate race in the NASCAR regular season and the penultimate road course on the schedule are the same race — Go Bowling at The Glen. The pressure is still on a few different drivers to make the playoff push and this is likely the “easier” track to make that push compared to next weekend.
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Watkins Glen Track Layout
The 11-turn, 2.45-mile road course in upstate New York has always been a fan and driver favorite alike. This is a less-technical, faster-speed road layout compared to most of the other layouts on the schedule. It’s more similar to Road America than COTA or Sonoma. At practice on Saturday, the Next Gen cars were flying around the track and several drivers talked about how on the edge the cars were on the curbing, which will be something to watch throughout the race.
Go Bowling at The Glen DFS Strategy
The strategy for road racing has typically been a rather simple one. Don’t really worry about laps led leaders and rather about the finishing position of the drivers in your builds. With the laps in a road race being so few, just 90 in this weekend’s race, there’s not a ton of difference laps led dominators and guys that just finish well. With .7 points in dominator points available a lap (.45 per fast lap and .25 for a lap led) there are a max of 63 points total available, but in reality there’s probably a max of between 50-55 points. That means the bulk of the scoring will come from PD and finish position this week. At Watkins Glen in the last five races, we’ve seen just over three drivers a race post double-digit position differential, eight drivers or so move up at least six spots, and just over a third of the top-10 finishers start outside the top-12. That means moving up can happen here, unlike we saw at COTA and especially Sonoma.
Practice To Qualifying
The following table shows the qualifying spots of each driver compared to their single lap and five-lap average in practice. It’s meant to show who may have qualified too high or too low based on practice.
| Driver | DK$ | FD $ | Prac to Qual | Qual | Comb. Prac | 5-Lap |
| Chase Elliott | $10,700 | $14,000 | -1 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Kyle Larson | $10,500 | $13,000 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Tyler Reddick | $10,300 | $13,500 | -3 | 5 | 8 | 5 |
| Ross Chastain | $10,000 | $12,500 | 7 | 18 | 11 | 13 |
| Austin Cindric | $9,800 | $11,000 | -5 | 8 | 13 | 20 |
| AJ Allmendinger | $9,600 | $10,500 | 3 | 6 | 3 | |
| Daniel Suarez | $9,400 | $12,000 | 0 | 9 | 9 | 6 |
| Ryan Blaney | $9,200 | $11,500 | 9 | 26 | 17 | 22 |
| Martin Truex Jr | $9,100 | $9,000 | -2 | 25 | 27 | 19 |
| Kyle Busch | $8,900 | $8,800 | -9 | 10 | 19 | 14 |
| Chase Briscoe | $8,800 | $10,000 | 7 | 14 | 7 | 37 |
| Christopher Bell | $8,700 | $9,500 | 22 | 38 | 16 | 15 |
| Denny Hamlin | $8,600 | $8,500 | 8 | 22 | 14 | 9 |
| Kevin Harvick | $8,400 | $8,200 | -7 | 24 | 31 | 27 |
| Joey Logano | $8,200 | $7,800 | 5 | 20 | 15 | 7 |
| Alex Bowman | $8,000 | $7,000 | 1 | 11 | 10 | 8 |
| Chris Buescher | $7,800 | $8,000 | 1 | 7 | 6 | 4 |
| William Byron | $7,700 | $7,500 | 0 | 4 | 4 | 2 |
| Kimi Raikkonen | $7,600 | $6,000 | 7 | 27 | 20 | 29 |
| Brad Keselowski | $7,300 | $6,500 | -9 | 15 | 24 | 23 |
| Michael McDowell | $7,100 | $7,200 | -15 | 3 | 18 | 11 |
| Ty Gibbs | $6,900 | $6,800 | 11 | 16 | 5 | 24 |
| Bubba Wallace | $6,800 | $5,800 | 2 | 23 | 21 | 10 |
| Erik Jones | $6,700 | $5,200 | 6 | 31 | 25 | 18 |
| Austin Dillon | $6,500 | $5,500 | -14 | 12 | 26 | 17 |
| Cole Custer | $6,300 | $6,200 | 1 | 29 | 28 | 26 |
| Aric Almirola | $6,200 | $5,000 | 6 | 35 | 29 | 25 |
| Ricky Stenhouse Jr | $6,100 | $3,500 | -12 | 21 | 33 | 21 |
| Justin Haley | $6,000 | $4,200 | 1 | 13 | 12 | |
| Harrison Burton | $5,800 | $4,800 | 0 | 30 | 30 | 28 |
| Todd Gilliland | $5,700 | $4,500 | -3 | 19 | 22 | 12 |
| Joey Hand | $5,500 | $4,000 | -6 | 17 | 23 | 16 |
| Corey Lajoie | $5,400 | $3,000 | -4 | 32 | 36 | 30 |
| Mike Rockenfeller | $5,200 | $2,000 | -2 | 33 | 35 | 34 |
| Ty Dillon | $5,100 | $4,000 | -4 | 28 | 32 | 31 |
| Daniil Kvyat | $4,900 | $2,000 | -2 | 36 | 38 | 36 |
| Cody Ware | $4,800 | $3,000 | 5 | 39 | 34 | |
| Loris Hezemans | $4,700 | $2,000 | -3 | 34 | 37 | |
| Kyle Tilley | $4,500 | $2,500 | -2 | 37 | 39 |
Average Points By Starting Spot
The following charts show the average points posted by starting spot in the last five Watkins Glen races regardless of the drivers in those starting spots. It’s meant to show the general strategy for building lineups rather than a hard-and-fast rule for who should be played.
One more late add to the playbook:
Kimi Raikkonen
It’s impossible to ignore the hype for Raikkonen, aka the Ice Man, this weekend. He started at well over 100-1 to win in most sportsbooks and dropped all the way to 50-1 by Thursday. Then he got faster each lap he put down on the track at practice and qualifying. He’ll start P27 and ran as fast as P20 in practice. If he can keep improving the times in the brand new car during the race there’s PD value here. Don’t forget that Trackhouse has been lightning quick on road layouts this year already and Raikkonen is a 21-time winner in F1 who’s well equipped to figure out this road layout. Don’t overplay him though as fading is still an option in case something goes wrong and you’re under on the field.
Stacks
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