atlanta post race and vegas peek ahead

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Picture c/o Stewart Haas Racing

If you played our main line-up this week, you doubled your money.  I played it in the $50 DK single entry game and doubled my money with a $100 payout.  Let's take another look at that line-up, which we posted late Saturday night:

• Harvick
• Truex
• Bowyer (or Kurt Busch)
• Blaney
• Kahne
• Ty Dillon

Harvick and Truex did exactly what we (and much of the industry) expected.  Harvick dominated and Truex charged to the front.  Both scored gobs of points as we thought they would.

Bowyer and Kurt Busch were the key to victory here.  Bowyer was under 10% owned in the games I played and Kurt was right around 10% owned.  Bowyer scored 55.5 points after finishing third from the ninth starting spot.  Kurt finished eighth after starting seventh, but he led 52 laps, so he scored 57.5 points.  We identified Bowyer based on how strong he was in final practice with single lap, 10 lap, 15 lap and 20 lap averages.  Kurt had a very strong recent history at Atlanta and ran solidly in practice as well.  So the signs were there if you did your homework -- which we did.

We also added Blaney based on his strong performance in final practice.  Watching that coverage really paid off.

We're obviously disappointed with Kahne and Ty Dillion.  We expected a bit better.  It turns out that the winner of the $50 DK contest had a very similar line-up.  They had the same four main drivers we posted, but used Austin Dillon and David Ragan instead of Kahne and Ty Dillon.  Austin made a huge difference -- scoring 41 points after finishing 14th from the 25th starting spot.  I didn't want to go there because I expected a Daytona hangover.  Plus Austin had no history of strong Atlanta runs -- finishing worse than 30th in two of the prior three races.  But taking those chances led to a very large pay day.

We also talked about fading Ryan Newman given his history of poor finishes from strong starting spots at Atlanta.  That was spot on as Newman finished 22nd and failed to score even 30 points.

As for our alternate lineups, they were designed as contrarian lineups to capitalize if Harvick or Truex, or both, ran into problems.  So these lineups obviously did poorly since the conventional wisdom prevailed this week.  In addition, both lineups featured Jimmie Johnson based on his strong Atlanta history and position difference potential.  But his day was all but over when he spun and suffered damage shortly before the end of Stage 2.  Again, if you're playing multiple line-ups, these are the types of line-ups you want to sprinkle in to hit it big if a race turns unpredictable and the favorites fall.  By their nature, these line-ups normally fail.  But when they succeed, they tend to win big.

On to Vegas!
Just a few quick notes on Vegas.  We'll spend much more time on it throughout the week:

• Truex won the Vegas race last year and he dominated 1.5 mile tracks -- will likely be the car to beat this week
• Watch all the Penske cars--
  • Keselowski has two wins and has finished 7th or better in the last five Vegas races
  • Logano has finished 4th, 2nd, 10th, and 4th in the last four Vegas races
  • Blaney has finished 7th and 6th in the last two Vegas races
• I don't know what to do with the 48 team right now, but Jimmie Johnson has led at least 19 laps in each of the last six Vegas races

(h/t to driveraverages.com for the data)

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