The Realm of the Verbal Processor

Fantasy NASCAR – Monster Day

I’m in a Fantasy NASCAR league with a couple of guys. In this league you pick four drivers for each race…one from an A list, two from a B list, and one from a C list. You get points based on how the drivers do in qualifying and the race. You also can only start a driver nine times over the course of the 36 races…so you can’t just start the same drivers each week. (Rules are here.) This adds a bit of strategy into figuring out which drivers will perform the best on the various tracks…and saving allocations for certain drivers for particular tracks later in the season. There are a lot of variables in the tracks that make them race differently. Some examples…length ranges from a half mile to 2.66 miles. Banking…some are flat, some are banked really high to allow you to maintain speed through the turns. Road courses. The surface also varies…some are smooth, rough, asphalt, concrete. Lots of variables.

Anyway, this week when I picked my drivers I was pretty happy with them. As the race went on today, I was really happy with them. Three of my drivers were running first, second and third through most of the race. My C driver was also in the top ten for a good portion of the race…until he made the mistake of speeding on Pit Road not once, but twice. The penalty for speeding on Pit Road is a “pass through” penalty…you have to come back down Pit Road. You don’t have to stop, but you do have to maintain the proper speed. The effect that this had was that my C driver (Brian Vickers) ended up going two laps down because of those penalties.

As the race ended up…my four drivers (Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards, Greg Biffle, and Brian Vickers) finished 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 13th. That equated to a monster 383 point day for me in the league. That is by far the best week I have had in two years doing the league. If not for Vickers penalties, he could have had a top five day. He still did pretty well for a C list driver, but it could have been a lot better.

June 1, 2008 - Posted by Jarvis | sports | NASCAR