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New Hampshire Motor Speedway Loudon -- 06/27/2010

Author: Jed Henson

Published: Wednesday Jun 23 2010 1:58pm

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The NASCAR Sprint Cup series rolls on to Loudon, N.H., this week for a run a New Hampshire Motor Speedway (NHMS). NHMS is an oval measuring roughly 1 mile in length with little banking in the turns. These specs place NHMS squarely in the short-flat track category, which includes Martinsville, Phoenix and Richmond. NASCAR handicappers therefore have a healthy amount of historical data to review this week, and lots of data generally improves race predictability.

In addition, NHMS is bigger than the congested, bumper-car tracks at Martinsville and Bristol, and smaller than the massive flat tracks (e.g., Michigan, Pocono, etc.) that tend to promote fuel-mileage tactics. Add in the good weather forecast for the rest of the week—Weather.com calls for clear skies Friday and Saturday, with a chance of scattered thunderstorms on Sunday—and I think race predictability is above average this week.

Handicapping New Hampshire
I pulled together and crunched the practice, qualifying and race data for all the races run on short-flat tracks in 2009 and 2010. Then I did the same for just the recent short-flat races, and then just the 2009 New Hampshire races. I compiled the results of those three analysis to produce preliminary driver rankings.

Finally, after re-reading some of my notes and articles from earlier this year and articles and posts by other online experts, I tweaked those rankings with my impressions of who is trending up and down on the short-flats.

Here's my preliminary top 10 for New Hampshire:

1. Jimmie Johnson
2. Jeff Gordon
3. Denny Hamlin
4. Juan Pablo Montoya
5. Mark Martin
6. Kyle Busch
7. Kurt Busch
8. Ryan Newman
9. Martin Truex Jr.
10. Clint Bowyer

I think Johnson is the clear favorite so far this week, and Gordon, Hamlin and Montoya are bunched tightly together. I'm uncomfortable ranking Martin so high because he seems to have become an afterthought this season, but his numbers look good—we shall see.

Stay tuned for my update following practice on Saturday.

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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