First Points Race Since 1996, and Blaney Shows Up Hot

Sunday is the first Cup points race at North Wilkesboro since 1996, and the timing could not set up better for Ryan Blaney. He has finished top 10 in eight straight races, he won Atlanta on Sunday leading 171 laps, and five of the next six Cup races run on flat tracks, where he has averaged a 6.0 finish since the start of last season, his best number on any track type by a wide margin. Our sim ran Sunday 10,000 times and has him and Hamlin in a coin flip at the top: Hamlin edges the finish projection and carries the best win odds at 14.2 percent, while Blaney projects 68 laps led, with Larson next at 53. In a 450-lap race, the laps-led pool alone is worth 112.5 DraftKings points. Blaney is the one you build lineups around, and Hamlin is the one our sim puts in victory lane most often, at least until qualifying moves the math.

The salary sheet has not caught all of it. William Byron carries our second-best win odds at the fifth-highest price. And Chase Elliott is the one we would avoid at the price: sixth-highest salary, a tenth-place median, and a 3.1 percent win shot.

Reddick is the third name in the title fight, but this is the wrong track to expect him to press it. By the numbers he is a big-oval racer: since the start of last season he has run about ninth on the fast, high-banked stuff and about twelfth on flat tracks, and North Wilkesboro is a flat track. The sim prices that in with a ninth-place median and 15 projected laps led, the weakest read of the three. That is not a slump, it is what his profile says a flat short track should look like, and at $9,200 we would look elsewhere Sunday.

Saturday's Truck race brought the Cup regulars with it. Bell, Elliott, Hocevar, and van Gisbergen all have rides, Ryan Newman is in a Kaulig truck, and the sim still points at the one guy who has led laps in every Truck race since this track came back. Corey Heim, back in the 5 for TRICON, has led 303 laps across the three runnings, and last year he led 162 and still finished 17th. His profile carries both halves of that story: the best projected finish in the field and 63 percent top-five odds, but just 11 percent to win. Layne Riggs is the win play at 22 percent, double Heim's number. And Hocevar, pulling double duty this weekend, projects sixth, third-highest truck on our table.

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.