Carl Edwards snagged a front-row starting spot Friday, and he's my pick up finish up front, too. (Photo Todd Warshaw/Getty Images for NASCAR)

The NASCAR Sprint Cup teams got in all three practice sessions and qualifying at Homestead Friday and Saturday. To handicap the race, I crunched the numbers from those prelim sessions to produce initial rankings, and then I merged those rankings with the historical rankings I produced earlier this week (weighting the results heavily toward the initial rankings). Finally, I tweaked the results per the 10-lap averages in practices 2 and 3.

I came up with this top six:

1. Carl Edwards
2. Jeff Gordon
3. Jamie McMurray
4. Jimmie Johnson
5. Kyle Busch
6. David Reutimann Continue reading →

Jimmie Johnson glides past the palm trees at Homestead in last year's race. (Photo Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

Well, race fans, it’s that time: the last race of the season down at Miami at Homestead. Homestead is a 1.5-mile track with 20 degrees of banking, making it pretty similar to the so-called cookie cutter tracks at Texas, Charlotte and Atlanta (1.5 milers with 24 degrees of banking), Chicagoland (a 1.5 miler with 18 degrees of banking) and Las Vegas (a 1.5 miler with 20 degrees of banking). To handicap the race, I crunched the qualifying and practice data from the 2010 races at Las Vegas and Chicagoland, and the fall 2010 races at Texas, Charlotte, and Atlanta. I then compiled the loop data from those same races and merged the results of the two analysis to come up with the below rankings.

I did not look at the 2009 race at Homestead because that race was an entire year ago, and I just can’t see its data having much value. I also excluded the spring races at Texas, Charlotte and Atlanta because that older data also has diminished value, and I think that with all the other data on hand, I can be choosy (i.e., my data sample size is OK as is).

I came up with this top eight: Continue reading →