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Dover International Speedway -- 09/26/2010

Author: Jed Henson

Published: Thursday Sep 23 2010 11:49am

Read all of Jed Henson's articles here


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The Sprint Cup series returns to Dover, Del., this week for a run on Dover International Speedway, a 1 mile, steep-banked, concrete track known as The Monster Mile. We should enjoy decent predictability this weekend because 1) we have solid 2010 practice, qualifying and race data to review from Dover and two other shortish-banked tracks, Bristol and Darlington, and 2) Weather.com Dover will receive dry, warm weather on Friday and Saturday, with a chance of showers on Sunday.

Handicapping Dover
I examined the practice, qualifying and race data from all the 2010 races at Dover, Bristol and Darlington to produce historical rankings. Then I looked at the same data for just the Dover race in May, and I merged those results with the historical rankings, thereby making the rankings much more Dover-specific.

I tweaked those initial rankings with the opinions of other online NASCAR handicappers and my own race-recap notes from the May Dover race to come up with this top 13:

1. Jimmie Johnson
2. Kyle Busch
3. Denny Hamlin
4. Kasey Kahne
5. Martin Truex Jr.
6. Carl Edwards
7. Ryan Newman
8. David Reutimann
9. Jeff Burton
10. Clint Bowyer
11. Jeff Gordon
12. Matt Kenseth
13. A.J. Allmendinger

Johnson and Kyle Busch stand out in my data, and they seem to be the clear mid-week favorites around the Internet as well.

Hamlin, on the other hand, seems to be off everyone's radar because aside from the May race, he has a history of poor finishes at Dover (he managed to finish 4th in May). It's important to note, however, that he had a very strong car in many of those races and finished poorly simply due to bad luck—e.g., crashes, penalties, mechanical issues, etc. When you're dealing with a small sample size of data—-six race-result charts, for example-—bad luck events can really throw the analysis out of whack. Bottom line: Hamlin is strong in the overall practice, qualifying and race data for the 2010 weekends at Dover, Bristol and Darlington, and he therefore deserves a high mid-week rating.

Stay tuned for my update following qualifying and the practice sessions.

Jed Henson publishes the blog NASCARPredict.com. He participates in the Nascapper forums and Free NASCAR Picks Monitor under the name Tucker19.

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