Auto Club Cup Series

What a wild Saturday. Before we get into Cup stuff, I wanted to talk for a minute about contest selection. Saturday's Xfinity contests had a great example to help understand why what contests you enter might be even more important then what lineup you use.

• DK user Felixingenium entered a lineup that scored 302.75 points. Let's look how that did in three different GPP contests.
  • In the $125k Piston, which allows up to 150 entries per person, and costs $10 to enter, the lineup finished in 119th place and returned $60, for a net gain of $50. Not bad.
  • In the $10l Pitstop, which allows up to 10 entries per person, and costs $33 to enter, the very same lineup finished 3rd and returned $500, for a net gain of $467. An awesome day.
  • In the $25k Spotter, which allows up to 4 entries per person, and costs $180 to enter, the very same lineup finished 1st and returned $5,000, for a net gain of $4,820. Now we're really talking.
  • I know not everyone will ever be comfortable playing in the higher entry fee contests. But, time after time, the same lineup will win a whole lot more in those contests then it will in the much larger, cheaper contests. Even if that style of play isn't available to you now, please keep all this in mind as a goal out there as you progress in DFS.

Now onto Cup stuff. I've got to think cash lineups are going to be so chalky with a host of good cars starting in the back due to numerous practice and qualifying issues. I really can't argue against playing any of the five guys who will be scored in the 30s - Almirola, Harvick, Chastain, Wallace and Kurt Busch. Kurt will have to do a drive through penalty, but with the number of expected cautions on Sunday, it's pretty likely he can get a lap back even if he does fall off the lead lap serving the penalty. You could conceivably use all five and then pick your favorite with the remaining salary.

• The other potential strategy would be to use four of them with Kyle Larson and then another salary fill in for the last spot. 
• I don't really have more to say about Sunday. The approach is really straight forward and a lot is really unknown, so I hate to overanalyze it when we really don't have relevant data to do so.

A couple of bets I like:

• Cindric +130 Briscoe
• Wallace +115 Burton
• Stenhouse +125 Burton
• Bowman +225 Top 5 finish