Daily Fantasy NASCAR Update - May 3, 2020

Chris Durell will be bringing you his weekly race breakdown, top trends, and top targets to help you cash on DraftKings and FanDuel. He also provides a comprehensive cheatsheet looking at current and career track history, current form, fantasy averages, trends, practice/qualifying information, and then puts it all together with a customizable model. Get your copy in our member's chatroom.

Premium DFSR members get access to my expert sheets as a part of their membership. That's a $10 value every single month, just for signing up for a DFSR membership! Want my sheets on their own? Head on over to my Patreon Page.

Raise your hand if you are ready for sports to come back? While I can't see you, I am pretty sure 100% of you reading this have at least one arm up in the air. It has been a very odd time lately and I am happy to be back talking REAL sports(no offense to the eGaming/eSports crowd). In this article, I just want to update you on the new NASCAR timeline as well as update you on a personal note of what I have been up to during the quarantine/social distancing period. Let's get started.

Personal Update

It was a wild timeline for me during this whole thing. It started out with my holiday to Phoenix which was going according to plan at the start as I was able to get to and enjoy the FanShield 500 at Phoenix Raceway with no idea it would possibly be the last race of the season with fans. Monday and Tuesday I got to visit our family friend who is in the SF Giants system and watch some practices at Spring Training facilities. Wednesday evening is when everything blew up as Rudy Gobert tested positive shutting down the NBA, followed by the NHL on Thursday. The PGA Championship was then canceled after Round 1 was suspended due to "dark conditions". I was still positive and prepped the Xfinity and Cup series sheets for the next weekend only to finish just as NASCAR postponed races as well.

With Spring Training also postponed, we finished our trip doing some outdoor stuff and got to do lots of kids stuff as well. We flew home late Saturday night and were about 2-3 days away from border and travel chaos. It was so weird as when we left there was no concern really at all about COVID-19 and never seen or heard a word about it in Phoenix the first 3-4 days.

I have learned a lot of new things over the past 6-7 weeks since the world has been shut down. Some of those things include just how huge gaming actually is, especially League of Legends which has more leagues, teams, and players worldwide than I had ever imagined. I even started playing the game(I am terrible) to getter a better perspective of how it is played and some of the strategies used. The daily fantasy results have been very up and down and mostly down since the start of most league playoffs as I am not personally a fan of the 2-3 games slate in any sport.

Along the way, I have also started sheets for the Outlaw Tour(small developmental golf tour in Arizona), UFC, Korean Baseball League, Call of Duty, and the iRacing Pro Invitational Series.

On top of all that, which is all new to me, I have been preparing my sheets for the start of the return to NHL, NBA, PGA, NASCAR, and the start of the MLB season. For NASCAR, I have been building a season by season, race by race, database to easily extract the data I want on a weekly basis based on track, track type, sample size of race form, etc. Things really ramped up with the announcement on Thursday that NASCAR will return to the track. Let's take a look below.

NASCAR Update

If you have been living under a rock and haven't heard the news........NASCAR is back! That's right, the governing body announced on Thursday cars will finally be back on track but with tons of changes. First of all, the schedule released is limited to Darlington and Charlotte for a total of seven races(3 Cup, 2 Xfinity, 1 Truck) in an 11-day period.

The first race takes us to Darlington Raceway on Sunday, May 17 for a 400-mile Cup Series race. The following Tuesday the Xfinity Series will run a race and on Wednesday, Darlington will turn on the lights for a second Cup Series race in four days. Before everyone starts screaming "but Darlington is a Crown Jewel event", NASCAR has already announced these two Cup races will not replace the Southern 500 which is set to kick off the 2020 Playoffs this season. As of now, NASCAR has also stated the 10-race Playoffs remains unchanged.

Speaking of Crown Jewel events on the NASCAR circuit, the second location being used in this initial schedule is Charlotte Motor Speedway and it begins with the Coca Cola 600 on Sunday, May 24. That will be followed by the Xfinity Series running a race on Monday night, the Truck Series running a race on Tuesday night, and wrapping up with a second Cup race on Wednesday night. Both races at Charlotte will be held on the oval setup with the road Course still in the Playoffs.

With the requirement that these events be one-day shows, NASCAR has decided there will be no practice sessions for any of the races and the only race with qualifying will be the Coca Cola 600.

For fantasy, this throws a wrench in things but it is not unprecedented as rain has halted practice and qualifying in the past. With a lack of race-weekend data, I will be relying heavily on track history and track-type history, especially from 2019 with the new downforce package that was introduced. Stay tuned for track breakdowns and fantasy preview/picks articles as we get closer to the first race. I will also be doing live raceday videos and will be available in chat as well.