Autism Speaks 400 presented by Hershey`s Milk & Milkshakes Race Preview

Dover International Speedway -- 05/16/2010

Author: Jed Henson

Published: Tuesday May 11 2010 10:42am

The Sprint Cup series moves 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 for several reasons. First, Dover hosted two Sprint Cup races last year, and the teams followed the typical pre-race schedule during both: practice and then qualifying on Friday, and then two more practices on Saturday. This schedule gives us solid total-speed data on the Practice 1 and qualifying speed charts, and excellent race-trim data on the Practice 2 and Happy Hour speed charts.

In addition to the 2009 Dover data, we can fine-tune our driver evaluations with the historical data from recent races at Bristol and Darlington. These tracks are far from Dover copies, of course, but they do share somewhat similar banking and length, so drivers and setups tend to perform somewhat similarly across them.

Finally, at press time Weather.com says scattered thunderstorms might visit Dover on Friday, but that Saturday and Sunday should feature partly cloudy skies with consistent mid-70s temperatures. At the least, then, we should get solid race-trim data on Saturday, and the chances of a rain stoppage on Sunday seem very low.

Handicapping Dover
I've evaluated all the aforementioned historical data for Dover, and I think Jimmie Johnson is the favorite. The fact he won both Dover races last year certainly doesn't hurt, but I'm not quite ready to anoint him the `clear favorite` because Kurt Busch rates not far behind the champ on The Monster Mile:

1. Jimmie Johnson
2. Kurt Busch
3. Ryan Newman
4. Juan Pablo Montoya
5. Greg Biffle
6. Matt Kenseth
7. Kasey Kahne
8. Mark Martin
9. Kyle Busch
10. David Reutimann
11. Jamie McMurray
12. Tony Stewart

Where's RCR?
I'm a little puzzled why none of the Richard Childress Racing guys—i.e., Jeff Burton, Kevin Harvick, and Clint Bowyer—showed well in my Darlington preview or this Dover preview. With Harvick atop the points standings and Burton and Bowyer running pretty well, too, it seems strange they haven't cracked my initial top 10 these past two weeks.

There are probably three reasons for this. First, the RCR cars ran poorly last season, and even though all three teams have dramatically improved this year, those run-bads continue to skew the historical data. Also, the RCR cars seem to race a little better than their practice and qualifying efforts suggest they will (especially Burton). And finally, they just aren't as good on these shortish-banked tracks as they are elsewhere.

I suspect the RCR cars will perform better than the historical data suggests in the preliminaries Friday and Saturday, possibly enough to push their way into my top 10, or higher. Last week Jeff Burton moved into my #5 spot following practice and qualifying at Darlington and ended up with probably the #3 car late in the race, so stay tuned—something similar could happen again.

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