NASCAR scoring revisited

A week or so ago I wrote a lengthy piece breaking down the Draft Kings DFS NASCAR scoring.  When selecting a Driver Lineup, I noticed myself doing thing that in a manner of speaking contradicted my previous article.

5 Hour Energy 301 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway Results

Maybe contradicted is too strong a word, but I must admit that, at minimum, it could cause a confusion.  The core of the problem is that I listed the Scoring Categories in order of impact on your
overall score.  There are Five things that Draft Kings gives credit for in their DFS system, and their order of impact on your final score goes in this order:

1. Finishing Position
2. Pass Differential
3. Place Differential
4. Laps Lead
5. Fastest Laps

In my original work, I clumped Pass & Place differential together, partly because there is a similarity between the two.  This was a bit of a mistake.  Pass differential can exceed, either negatively or positively, a number more than the number of cars in the field.  Take for instance last week's race 5hour Energy 301 in New Hampshire.  Kyle Busch won the race, but finished well behind Brad Keselowski in DFS points trailing 107.5-82.25.  This was almost completely due to Kyle's -44 Pass differential. I'm not sure how you can win a race while being passed by 44 more cars than you pass, but he figured it out [I know it has something to due with the fact that cars passed or cars passed by don't count if you're officially in a pitstop].

But that's not the main bone of contention, just a very curious item worth noting.

The problem that may appear to be a contradiction is that I look at the two lowest scoring items when endeavoring to pick a lineup.

• Laps Lead

Laps Lead scores at a meager .25 pts per lap, and really has little effect on most of the racers each day.  Only a handful of driver lead any laps, most of them only for a couple, and it takes 4 complete laps just to get one point.  In this weekend's race, Brad Keselowski and Kyle Bush led for 101 and 95 laps respectively, which was good for 25.25 and 23.75 points each.  A nice total but only these two and Kevin Harvick (59 laps lead) scored more than 5 points from this category.

However, in selecting a lineup, I purposefully looked for driver who had real possibilities of leading laps.  I looked mostly at recent history, driver history at that particular racecourse, speed of the car, and lineup position.  It wasn't that I was shooting to get the 25 points because I thought Keselowski would lead 100 laps, but rather because Leading Laps is probably the best predictor of the biggest point scorer: Finishing position.  In order to win a race, you have to lead at least one lap, the final one, but more often than not much more than this.  If you look at last week's race results, only six drivers led 10 laps or more.  And they finished 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 7th, and 13th.  There is a strong correlation between leading laps and finishing the race high in the standings.  Stronger than probably any other factor.

• Fastest Laps

I also considered how fast the car is.  You can pretty effectively shorthand this stat by simply looking at lineup position, as the closer you are to the pole the faster your car is in qualifying.  An early lineup position might hurt your driver if they can't maintain their position due to pass & place differential, but having a faster car puts you in line to pick up points here rather than lose them.  Plus it gives the driver a greater chance to make up ground should they fall behind due the natural action of coming into the pits.  There's no great secret revealed here that you want a fast car. 

So, the thing to note is that even though Fastest Laps and Laps Lead on average give out the fewest points, the by products of doing well in these statistics yields everything you want out of your DFS Driver: the chance to win, the opportunity to finish near the top of the standings, and the ability to pass other cars on the raceway.