DraftKings NASCAR DFS Picks for Daytona: Fantasy NASCAR Strategy and Picks for the 2024 Daytona 500

The NASCAR Cup Series kicks off the 2024 season with its marquee event, the Daytona 500.

The Daytona 500 is always a drama-filled event, and with some new alliances and new manufacturer bodies, there are sure to be extra twists and turns this year.

Predicting the finishing order of the Daytona 500 is next to impossible. Even the most accurate statistical models can only forecast finishing order to about 10-15% accuracy.

Instead, what we can predict is human behavior. My ownership projections last year had an accuracy north of 85%, and where the ownership projections differ from the chances a driver ends up in the optimal lineup, that’s where we attack.

Thus, my approach to superspeedways is to find the key leverage spots and go underweight on drivers who will be rostered too much. The opposite is true of lightly utilized drivers. I’ll want to be overweight on them when constructing a tournament portfolio.

With all that in mind, I’ll give you my favorite overweight and underweight plays for Sunday’s DraftKings Millionaire Maker contest.

Before we jump into my picks, don’t forget all my NASCAR projections can be found in the NASCAR Models on FantasyLabs, complete with floor, ceiling, median, and ownership projections.

Let’s not skip the best part — my Perfect% metric — a metric that tells you how often certain racers appear in the optimal lineup when running 10,000 race simulations.

And don’t forget about the tools that FantasyLabs has to offer, like our Lineup Optimizer to effortlessly create up to 300 lineups, or our Lineup Builder if you like to hand-build your lineups.

Here are my NASCAR DFS picks for the 2024 Daytona 500.

Daytona DraftKings DFS Cash Game Picks

For cash games, I use a very simple approach. Pick drivers starting in the back.

Yes, that means you can roster David Ragan, Anthony Alfredo, Noah Gragson, and Daniel Hemric in cash games, among others. In fact I think this is a solid approach with Ryan Blaney likely to be overutilized in cash games, since Blaney has around a 35% chance of having a bad day but is likely to be in more cash lineups than that.

That’s really all there is to it if you’re playing cash games.

As we saw in the Duel qualifying races, every single driver was able to hang in the draft. That means every single driver is viable to finish well on the lead lap, so let’s hope for some mayhem (as there typically is at Daytona) and rack up that place differential.

Daytona DraftKings DFS Millionaire Maker Strategy

Before we dive into my Millionaire Maker overweight and underweight plays, we need to talk some strategy.

First, my opinion is that Toyota has been the strongest manufacturer in race conditions. The Toyotas in single-car qualifying all qualified 22nd or worse, meaning they started their Duel races all 11th or worse out of 21 cars.

Yet every single one of them had no issue moving forward, with most of them doing it with ease. The new nose really helps them push in the draft, and in practice they were able to stay closer together than any other manufacturer, putting up the best drafting time in the lone practice session.

By contrast, the Fords looked a bit shaky, while Chevrolet was Chevrolet and performed about as expected compared to last year. That said, the Penske affiliated cars (Team Penske, Wood Brothers Racing, Front Row Motorsports) did put up a solid practice time, so I’d look toward them still performing best of the Ford camp. However, we can never rule out the RFK Racing trio of Brad Keselowski, Chris Buescher, and David Ragan as well.

I also like to break things down into tiers by starting position.

This year, there’s a pretty clear cutoff after Martin Truex Jr., who starts 27th. Thus, in the tier of drivers starting 28th or worse, it’s pretty clear Ryan Blaney will be the highest-owned driver with Kyle Busch coming in second. Austin Dillon, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., and David Ragan should all pull in significant ownership as well among the bottom third of starters.

Since everyone runs so close together in the draft, and one wrong move can take out one-third of the field or more totally at random, that makes these drivers prime underweight plays while making the rest of them potential overweight candidates.

So let’s dive into my favorite overweight and underweight plays, with the reasons why.

Daytona DraftKings DFS Millionaire Maker Picks

Overweight Plays:

1. Daniel Hemric ($5300): Hemric comes in second overall in leverage (Perfect% – Own%), but he gets my top nod for a few reasons. First, he’s in a Chevy compared to Riley Herbst in a Stewart-Haas Ford. Second, Hemric has Anthony Alfredo starting two places behind him and Noah Gragson one place behind, so they are likely to draw ownership a bit away from Hemric and onto them just by virtue of having an extra starting position or two of place-differential potential. Hemric also catches a lot of flak for his poor upside results, with only one win across all three major NASCAR series in 283 starts. But I worry about that a lot less at the great equalizer — superspeedway racing. Hemric’s optimal is around 28%, but I want some extra leverage shooting for the Million dollars, so you can be sure I’ll be above that in my total Hemric exposure.
2. Todd Gilliland ($5500): Gilliland still doesn’t get the respect he deserves at superspeedways thanks to his poor finishing results, but that’s largely due to bad luck. In eight superspeedway races at Daytona and Talladega, he’s had major incidents in five of them. In the other three, his average finish is 10.0. Gilliland constantly moves forward in these races, running as high as sixth in seven of the eight. He also was the only Ford in the first Duel qualifying race who looked like he could make moves. As part of that Team Penske alliance as a Front Row Motorsports driver, he’s in the best equipment he’s ever had.
3. A.J. Allmendinger ($6200): Remember how I talked about that tier starting just after Martin Truex Jr., who starts 27th? Well, Allmendinger is the “dropoff” driver who starts 28th. By starting at the very front of this tier, he’ll probably draw lower ownership than he should. But Allmendinger knows how to get it done at superspeedways, with four straight top-five finishes in the Xfinity series at Daytona and a win and two other third-place finishes in the last four races at Talladega in that series. In the Cup Series, Allmendinger placed sixth in this very race last year, and he also had a third at the smaller drafting track of Atlanta. The Dinger has three other top-three finishes at Daytona in the Cup Series.

Underweight Plays:

1. Fade the front four: Since NASCAR moved to the 40-car field in 2016, no driver starting in the first two rows has ended up with at least 47 points under the current DraftKings scoring system. That’s important, because 47 points has been needed to crack every winning and optimal lineup in that time frame. That means we’re going extremely underweight (or even completely fading) Joey Logano ($9200), Michael McDowell ($7200), Tyler Reddick ($7800), and Christopher Bell ($8300).
   
2. Ryan Blaney ($9600): First and foremost, I’m not saying fade Ryan Blaney. I’m saying go underweight on him. this is an important distinction, because I’ll surely have a quite a bit of exposure to Blaney myself. It just won’t be as much as the field. While Blaney is in a Team Penske Ford, the Fords as a whole have looked a bit slower in the draft compared to years past. The fact that Blaney has a new spotter, which is massively important at superspeedways, is also a bit of a knock. It takes time to build that chemistry, as the spotter is the driver’s other set of eyes and mirrors. One slip up in communication could cost Blaney big time.

Daytona DraftKings DFS Paul Menard Pick of the Week!

The weekly segment that everyone loves is back for another year!

For those who don’t know what I mean, I once told everyone to go significantly overweight on Paul Menard at a Daytona summer race because he projected to be severely underplayed.

All he did was finish third and score myself and my readers a massive return on their investment, becoming a legend in my circles in the process.

So, for the 2024 Daytona 500, the “Paul Menard pick of the week” is … drumroll please … Zane Smith!

This might be a bit of a wild card, especially given that my projections aren’t even showing value on Smith compared to his expected usage, but I’m still buying.

Smith drives for Spire Motorsports in an alliance with Trackhouse Racing. Trackhouse has a win with Ross Chastain at Talladega two years ago, and Smith is a back-to-back Daytona winner in the Truck Series.

He’s also part of the Chevy stable that is my second-preferred manufacturer, to only Toyota.

I think my model is too low on Zane Smith, and while he projects for low single-digit usage, I’ll probably be toward the higher single digits, or maybe even the low double digits in an effort to take down a million bucks!