Sep 10

Written by: The Commish
9/10/2010 1:01 PM 

Cup and Nationwide are racing at Richmond this weekend and Denny Hamlin is the odds-on pick favorite (22% of all teams) for Saturday night followed by Jimmie Johnson, Kyle, Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon and Kevin Harvick.  Carl Edwards has some Ford fans rooting for him and Kurt Busch is the most popular Dodge starter.

That sounds about right.  I think the race winner is in that group.

I also think there's going to be 12 guys trying really really hard to earn those last NASCAR bonus points for a race win, so hard that there will be plenty of cautions, spins, crashes, taps, turns and blown tempers. 

The 2011 Nationwide cars race Friday night and this is the one series, probably because everyone is still competing on a relatively level (new) playing field, that doesn't really have any favorites outside the group of Cup teams who do what they do so well.  

Kyle was picked by 36% of the Super 7 Sweep teams followed by Brad Keselowski (29%) and Carl Edwards (18%).  After those three there was a big drop off to small single digit picks including Harvick and Hamlin and then the many less-than-one-percent picks like Joey Logano, Justin Allgaier, Aric Almirola and Clint Bowyer.

I picked Busch.  Despite him driving a pink 'love' car like the one in the NASCAR Toyota TV commercials.

This is the last Rolex race of the season and the No. 01 Ganassi Riley BMW was picked by over 81% of all players for good reason with the No. 99 Gainsco Riley Chevy the second most popular pick (11%), followed by the No. 10 SunTrust Dallara Ford with almost 5% of the selections.  Once again, unless something odd happens the winner will probably be one of those three entries.

I'll miss picking Rolex racers from now on, even if it was usually just picking which entry would accompany the No. 01 car when I could make two picks.

Lewis Hamilton garnered 37% of the player picks for the F1 race at Monza with Vettel and Weber next (25% and 20% respectively) followed by Fernando Alonzo who shows up on 10% of all participating FMFL teams.  Massa and Schumacher got some picks, as did Kubica and Nico Rosberg, with Rubens Barichello and Adrial Sutil also getting a couple of prayerful nods.

Everything I read talks about the Mercedes horsepower advantage and I guess that's one reason why Hamilton is favored over both Red Bull drivers and why Sutil, in the Force India Mercedes actually got a few picks.

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