Tag Archives: Daytona

Final Rankings: Daytona II, 2017

brad keselowski photo

Brad Keselowski remains my pick to win Daytona II tonight in my final driver rankings. (photo courtesy nascar)

Here are my final driver rankings for tonight’s Daytona II race. I compiled them by crunching the Friday qualifying data from Daytona, and then melding it with the historical data:

  1. Brad Keselowski
  2. Joey Logano
  3. Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
  4. Dale Earnhardt Jr.
  5. Ryan Blaney
  6. Chase Elliott
  7. Kevin Harvick
  8. Kurt Busch
  9. Kyle Busch
  10. Denny Hamlin Continue reading

Early Rankings: Daytona II, 2017

brad keselowski photo

Brad Keselowski tops my early Daytona II driver rankings. (photo courtesy nascar)

Update: I’ve posted my final Daytona II driver rankings, which improve upon the below early rankings.

Here are my early driver rankings for this week’s Daytona II race. I compiled them by crunching the loop and qualifying data for the past four plate races. Those metrics reflect speed, the ability to pass and the ability (and inclination) to run a lot of laps up front:

  1. Brad Keselowski
  2. Joey Logano
  3. Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
  4. Ryan Blaney
  5. Kurt Busch
  6. Kyle Busch
  7. Denny Hamlin
  8. Kyle Larson
  9. Dale Earnhardt Jr.
  10. Chase Elliott Continue reading

DraftKings Lineups: Daytona I, 2017

Kyle Busch photo

Kyle Busch looms large in my top 30 optimized DraftKings lineups for the Daytona 500 today. (photo courtesy nascar)

I’ve used my lineup optimizer to compile my top 30 DraftKings NASCAR driver lineups for today’s Daytona 500. To compile them, first I plugged my final driver rankings for today’s race and the starting lineup into my driver points projection model to project how many DraftKings points each driver will score at Daytona today. Then I ran those points projections through a knapsack-problem optimizer algorithm I created in Google Sheets with the OpenSolver add-on, which churned through all possible driver combinations to calculate the 30 best lineups for today’s race.

The lineups are sorted in descending order of total predicted points scored, and the total predicted points have been rounded to the nearest hundredth. I posted them in a PDF file you can download and view for $3. Here’s the link: Daytona 500 2017 DraftKings Lineups

Note: No guarantee comes with my lineups, rankings, predictions, etc. Use them at your own risk. To get a feel for how the lineups look, check out my Kansas I 2016 DraftKings lineups.

Good luck today!