Hamlin Is 0-for-17 at the Brickyard. Our Sim Ranks Him First Anyway.

Denny Hamlin comes to the Brickyard leading the points, chasing his first championship. This Sunday his focus is on another trophy and one he can take home now. He has won the Daytona 500 three times, the Southern 500 twice, and the Coca-Cola 600. The Brickyard 400 is the only crown jewel he has never won: seventeen starts since 2006, four third-place finishes including last July.

Our sim ran Sunday 10,000 times and makes this his best shot in years. Hamlin ranks first on our table with a median finish of 5th, the only median inside the top five in the field, and a 20.9% win chance, with Larson next at 12.1%. The profile agrees. Indianapolis is classified in our system as a flat track first, Hamlin has a 2.2 average finish on flat tracks over the last six months, and the only other track on the schedule with Indy's exact classification is Pocono, where his last four finishes are first, second, second, and first.

One for the chart-crime file before the picks: the big oval has run exactly twice in the Next Gen era, so every bar on that chart is a sample of two. But even two races say something when everything points one way. The field churns here like a superspeedway, third-most spots moved of the 23 tracks we can compare, and the winner still comes from near the front: but no pole winner, no winner from 15th or deeper, and the car that led the most laps lost both times.

That shapes the build. The Brickyard runs 160 laps, so the entire laps-led pool is worth 40 DraftKings points, and finishing position decides most of the scoring. Kyle Larson projects the most laps led at 23, worth only about six DraftKings points, and he projects a median finish of 7th. Tyler Reddick carries the fourth-highest salary at $10,200 with an 8.7% win shot and 4.2 projected laps led; we would look elsewhere at the price. Chase Briscoe projects within a tenth of a lap of Hamlin's laps-led number at $1,800 less. And Joey Logano led 323 laps last Sunday, but he projects a median 11th finish here.

The manufacturer picture is lopsided. Five of the ten best projections on our table are Toyotas: Hamlin, Reddick, Briscoe, Bell, and Gibbs. Chevrolet's answer is Hendrick. Larson has finished first and second in the two Next Gen Brickyards, William Byron ran 6th on average here last year with a 110 driver rating before a 16th-place finish, and Chase Elliott is ninth on our table. Carson Hocevar is the one Spire car knocking, 12th on our table. The Fords are the question. Blaney and Logano hold their only two spots in our top ten. Behind them the Indy history is real: Keselowski owns a 2018 Brickyard win and finished fifth here last year, Preece finished fourth, and Cindric was seventh in 2024. The season is the problem: Preece and Keselowski sit outside the Chase cutline, Cindric is holding the last spot inside it, and the sim gives the three of them a best median finish of 15th.

Bubba Wallace won this race a year ago, the win that ended his hundred-race drought. The sim prices the defending winner mid-pack: a median finish of 11th and a 4.3% win shot at $9,000. And there is one variable nobody has data on yet: Goodyear brings a new right-side tire to Indy this weekend, which makes Friday practice unusually informative. The Practice Lab in Turn Four Racing Pro charts every session run by run; that is where we will be reading the tire.

Saturday's Pennzoil 250 has two Cup regulars in it, Elliott and Ross Chastain. Justin Allgaier carries the field's best win odds at 22.1% with a median finish of 5th, the win in the last O'Reilly race at Atlanta, and twelve prior starts on the big track with a win and 112 laps led. Elliott actually ranks first on our O'Reilly table with the field's best average finish and the same median finish of 5th, but with a smaller win number at 14.8%.

Layne Riggs is the truck to beat Friday night at IRP. He won there last year leading 160 of the 200 laps, and he has three wins in his last six starts plus a runner-up finish last weekend. The sim ranks him first with a median finish of 4th, the field's best win chance at 22.2%, more than double Chandler Smith's, and just over 40 projected laps led. Smith, who led 105 laps winning last weekend's race, projects a median finish of 5th, second on our table. It is a short track at night and variance is real, but those two are the class of the field.

These tables are Thursday's snapshot, from a sim run before practice and qualifying. The sim keeps re-running through practice, qualifying, and driver news, right up to the green flag.