NASCAR DFS: Pennzoil 400 Track Breakdown

Viva Las Vegas! Sin City is hosting this week’s NASCAR action as the Pennzoil 400 comes to Las Vegas Motor Speedway for the third race of the year. Last week’s action at Auto Club set a good tone for what we could see in Vegas this weekend as they are both intermediate tracks. That being said though, that’s where the similarities stop.

Las Vegas Motor Speedway is a 1.5-mile track with progressive banking in the corners and is a relatively low-tire-wear track. It’s previously been known as a track where passing for the lead can be tough under green, though we expect that to change with the new cars set to race this weekend. It’s also been known as a low caution-rate track, but again, get ready for that to be different this weekend. The new cars are still being felt out by the drivers and the teams but they’ve already proven to be the toughest cars to drive in the Cup series in a very long time and it’s been easier to spin out as well. In fact, the car has been so challenging that NASCAR changed the practice format this week to a 35-minute session from a 15-minute session for each half of the field. If we’re looking at races here to compare this weekend’s impending action to, the 2014-2016 races were ones with more passing and higher caution rates.

While Auto Club isn’t all that comparable to Vegas in style and track condition, we can take away quite a bit from the racing. With the parity from last week, a lot more drivers/teams will be in play this week. The next gen car was built specifically to put teams on a level playing field and leave more to the drivers, and so far that’s exactly what we’ve seen.

Strategy Notes

This weekend is the first true intermediate track that we’ll see raced this season but that doesn’t mean the strategy changes that much from last week. The biggest difference for this week is being a bit more cognizant of the role that cautions will likely play in the race and breaking up the long green-flag runs we typically see here. As I stated above, the current package is harkening back to 2014-16 style of racing and in that span, one Vegas was a once a year track, twice we saw races without a driver topping 80 laps led in the race. Last week, even with the extra cautions, we still saw one car lead the bulk of the laps, I’m not so sure that happens again this week, unless one team is just that much better than the others. Vegas has been known as a place it’s hard to pass at over the last few years, and that’s been true (just look at the table below). However, in 2014-2016 there were between 5-9 drivers a race to post double-digit positive place differential marks. That being said, the winner of this race has still started inside the top-10 of the grid all but three times dating back to 2014. Green Flag speed at similar tracks is going to be important this week so make note of that in the tables below. The eye test for who’s started off quickly and looked good in practice will also carry much of the weight over track histories. Expect to see more long runs being made in practice in Saturday with the elongated session time now in place.

Facts To Know:

• Over the last eight races here, eight drivers have a Driver Rating over 100 and three of them are/were Penske drivers.
• Ford has won six of the last 12 races here but hasn’t won since February of 20202 (Logano).
• Nine different teams finished in the top-10 last week with only SHR being the team to have multiple drivers there. Parity will likely happen again this week.
• If trends do hold here, over the last five races here, 48-percent of the top-10 finishers started outside the top-10.
• There are 187 dominator points available on DraftKings this week and 26.7 on FanDuel which is enough to make a big difference between lineups.
• Since 2014, there have been as few as 12 and as many as 25 cars to finish on the lead lap at Vegas.
• Only three drivers in the field have a Top-15 Rate of over 90-percent over the last five races here (Larson, Blaney, and Truex)

Last 5 Race Stats

The table below shows the number of drivers to reach each stat-type over the last five Auto Club races with Race 1 being the most recent.

For the tables below:

• The DFS Scoring Table: Race 1 is the most recent race in the sample size with Race 5 being the earliest. We are using the Last 5 Las Vegas races for the data.
• The Similar Races table: The data is comprised of stats from the last 16 (4 each) races across Charlotte, Kansas, Las Vegas, and Texas.
• NEW - The Weekly Track Stats table shows the averages for each stat shown based on starting spot. The data goes includes every race at this week’s track since 2012.