It's been a long time since I've added anything to the blog site, so I figured I'd jot down some tips that I've got for picking the selections in the
Race Game. Before you read on, however, I guess the big question is whether or not you'd want to follow my advice. Well, I'll leave that one up to you.
I guess we should start at the basics. If you have no idea what you're doing, then you should probably take a quick look at the standings in the Sprint Cup and at least make sure your picks are from the top 25 or so. There are exceptions to this rule, the first being road courses and the second being super speedways. Road courses we can ignore as there aren't any in the 10 chase races. There's one race at Talledega in the chase that's a super speedway and you can still apply these rules - basically a lot of cars wreck in the big races and there's an element of luck about which drivers are left running at the end of the race. The top 27 drivers with the car number they are typically associated with as of writing this are as follows:
| Pn | Car# | Driver |
| 1 | 11 | Denny Hamlin |
| 2 | 29 | Kevin Harvick |
| 3 | 18 | Kyle Busch |
| 4 | 24 | Jeff Gordon |
| 5 | 2 | Kurt Busch |
| 6 | 48 | Jimmie Johnson |
| 7 | 99 | Carl Edwards |
| 8 | 16 | Greg Biffle |
| 9 | 31 | Jeff Burton |
| 10 | 14 | Tony Stewart |
| 11 | 17 | Matt Kenseth |
| 12 | 33 | Clint Bowyer |
| 13 | 39 | Ryan Newman |
| 14 | 1 | Jamie McMurray |
| 15 | 00 | David Reutiman |
| 16 | 42 | Juan Montoya |
| 17 | 5 | Mark Martin |
| 18 | 88 | Dale Earnhardt Jr |
| 19 | 9 | Kasey Kahne |
| 20 | 56 | Martin Truex Jr |
| 21 | 43 | AJ Almendinger |
| 22 | 20 | Joey Logano |
| 23 | 98 | Paul Menard |
| 24 | 6 | David Ragan |
| 25 | 47 | Marcos Ambrose |
| 26 | 12 | Brad Keselowski |
| 27 | 77 | Sam Hornish Jr |
The second tip is that the race selection isn't locked until just before the race starts. That means you can go to
Nascar's website and see how the drivers did in practice and qualifying.
The third is to look at your chase drivers. The top 12 in the list above are the chase contenders. These got there because they've had a good season. Generally one or two of them fall behind, but more often than not you see about 6-8 of the chase drivers finishing in the top 10. It's worth making sure you've at least some of them in there.
If you want to get technical, you can look at track type and distance and match up to the drivers form. Carl Edwards earned the nickname “Concrete Carl” because of his success on concrete tracks. Kyle Busch always seens to run well on the short tracks. Jimmie Johnson is generally there or there abouts on the mile and a half tracks. Although Dale Earnhardt Jr doesn't seem to be as successful as his fans want him to be, he's always a good choice on the super speedways.
Last would be to look at the potential spoilers. Spoilers are the non chase drivers that finish in the top 10. Given that the top 12 drivers are fighting for points, if a non-chase driver finishes ahead of them, then it takes more points away from that chase driver. And there's nothing more that the non chase drivers like than to steal a win and prove a point - they've got to finish the season with something.
A couple of top picks in spoilers are both the Earnhardt Ganassi drivers - Jamie McMurray and Juan Pablo Montoya. Both have won races this year, but both have struggled with consistency - too many DNFs left them wanting for the chase, but they continue to finish well if they make it to the end of the race. Kasey Kahne's probably another one you'd put in that bucket too.
Newman, Truex, Reutimann, Martin and Allmendinger are also good calls. I probably wouldn't go much beyond that for these races, but that's just my thoughts.
