Tums Fast Relief 500 Race Preview

Martinsville Speedway -- 10/24/2010

Author: Jed Henson

Published: Friday Oct 22 2010 6:55am

The Sprint Cup series returns this week to Martinsville, Va., for another run on the .5 mile flat track known as `the paperclip.` Martinsville Speedway is like no other track on the circuit, but for handicapping purposes you can group it loosely with other short, flat tracks to increase the sample-size of practice, qualifying and race data you analyze.

For this race, I did just that. I examined the practice, qualifying and race data for the 2010 races at New Hampshire, Richmond, Phoenix and of course Martinsville to produce initial rankings. Then I crunched the numbers for the just the March race at Martinsville and merged those results with the initial rankings to bias the results toward the Martinsville numbers. Finally, I tweaked the rankings after reading my race recap from the March race at Martinsville and the opinions of other online handicappers.

I came up with this top 10:

1. Denny Hamlin
2. Jeff Gordon
3. Jimmie Johnson
4. Ryan Newman
5. Jeff Burton
6. Clint Bowyer
7. Joey Logano
8. Mark Martin
9. Carl Edwards
10. Jamie McMurray

Hamlin had the best car at Martinsville in March, and he's been strong on the other short-flats this year, too. I also expect Gordon to run well, and although Johnson looks surprisingly down a bit in the numbers so far this week, beware of counting that team out.

Stay tuned for my update following qualifying and practice.

Comment on this article.

(255 chars max)

Username:
(No HTML)

Captcha: