Lone Star 500 Race Preview

Texas Motor Speedway -- 11/7/2010

Author: Jed Henson

Published: Thursday Nov 4 2010 7:00am

This week the Sprint Cup series returns to the lightning-fast cookie-cutter track known as Texas Motor Speedway (TMS). TMS is a 1.5-mile D-shaped track with progressive banking. The NASCAR tracks at Charlotte and Atlanta are almost identical, and the Las Vegas and Homestead tracks are pretty close, too.

Handicappers therefore have a wealth of historical data to review this week in the numbers from practice, qualifying and the race from each event at these tracks this year.

Handicapping Texas II
I examined the practice, qualifying and race data for the 2010 races at Charlotte, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Homestead and of course Texas to produce initial rankings. Then I crunched the numbers for the just the April race at Texas and merged those results with the initial rankings to bias the results toward the Texas numbers. In addition, for the first time I factored in the loop data from the 2010 races at the cookie cutter tracks. Finally, I tweaked the rankings after reading my notes from the April race at Texas.

I came up with this top 10:

1. Jimmie Johnson
2. Kyle Busch
3. Jeff Gordon
4. Tony Stewart
5. Kurt Busch
6. Greg Biffle
7. Clint Bowyer
8. Denny Hamlin
9. Ryan Newman
10. Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Johnson, Kyle Busch and Gordon are the cream of the crop this week. Stewart should also be tough—he might've won the spring Texas race had not a big wreck taken him out near the end. (Gordon's outstanding day was ruined in that wreck, too.)

The Prelims
Weather.com calls for clear, consistent weather from today through Sunday, so the teams should get in all of their prelim work. That will give handicappers a very good idea of who's fast this week.

I will crunch those numbers, so stay tuned for my update following qualifying and practice.

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