Update: I’ve posted my final Martinsville I driver rankings, which improve upon the below early rankings.
Here are my early driver rankings for this week’s NASCAR Cup race at Martinsville. I compiled them by crunching:
- The loop data for the past 15 Cup races (excluding Daytona and Talladega);
- the loop data for the past four races;
- the loop data for the past four races at Martinsville;
- the loop data for the past eight races at the other tracks in the Flats track group (i.e., Richmond, Phoenix, Indy, Pocono and New Hampshire);
- the practice and qualifying data for the past four races at Martinsville; and
- the practice and qualifying data for past eight races at the aforementioned Flats.
The results:
- Kyle Busch
- Martin Truex Jr.
- Joey Logano
- Brad Keselowski
- Kyle Larson
- Kevin Harvick
- Denny Hamlin
- Matt Kenseth
- Jimmie Johnson
- Erik Jones
- Chase Elliott
- Jamie McMurray
- Ryan Newman
- Kasey Kahne
- Dale Earnhardt Jr.
- Kurt Busch
- Ryan Blaney
- AJ Allmendinger
- Austin Dillon
- Paul Menard
- Clint Bowyer
- Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
- Aric Almirola
- Ty Dillon
- Danica Patrick
- Trevor Bayne
- Daniel Suarez
- David Ragan
- Michael McDowell
- Chris Buescher
- Landon Cassill
- Matt DiBenedetto
- Cole Whitt
- Gray Gaulding
- Corey LaJoie
- Reed Sorenson
- Jeffrey Earnhardt
- Timmy Hill
Will you take starting position into account (more so than at 1.5 mile oval) when predicting projected draft kings point? For example on these short tracks drivers starting one or 2 have a significant advantage with regard to laps led and fatstes laps.
JD, my DK projection model does take starting position into account, but right now it’s only a small factor, and it’s generic across all tracks. I might look into tweaking it for different tracks. I’m guessing it’d hard to quantify.
Definitely hard to quantify and would need to scrub for anomalies. But if you were to look at the last 6 races at martinsville you would see a strong correlation between starting spot and total points. Thanks again for your contribution