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The NASCAR Cup Series races for the first time in over a week on Sunday as it heads to New Hampshire Motor Speedway for the Foxwoods Resort Casino 301. It's fitting that we visit this track this week, as track founder Bob Bahre passed away in late July, and NASCAR will get the chance to honor everything Bahre did for the sport.
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Game 1: More or Less Fantasy Points (2/2): Kevin Harvick (more than 19.5) and Denny Hamlin (less than 18.5)
I almost went with the double more this week because of how well Denny Hamlin's been running, but both of these drivers hitting the over would probably be pretty tough.
I'm pretty confident in Harvick this week, even if 19.5 is a LOT of fantasy points. Why? Because his recent history here.
The MKF scoring system is 20 points for first, 19 for second, 18 for third, etc., and then 0.1 for each lap led.
Last year, Harvick had 24.1 here. In 2018, he had 21.2. He's led over 100 laps at New Hampshire three times. There's a lot of good stuff in the Stewart Haas star's history here, which should help him squeak by the over even if he doesn't win.
As for Hamlin, he's already won five races this season -- his 11 wins in the last two years is more than he had from 2013 to 2018 -- and he had 30.3 MKF points here last year. But he's also struggled in races where he wasn't up front -- this is a pretty hit or miss track for him, and since 2016 he has a win, a second place, and then a ninth, 12th, 13th and 15th place finish. Those kinds of runs don't help him hit the over, so I'm taking the under here based on Hamlin's volatility.
Game 2: More or Less Fantasy Points (2/2): Kyle Busch (over 16.5 Fantasy Points) and Chase Elliott (under 16.5 Fantasy Points)
Is this a good track for Kyle Busch? Yeah, he has three wins here, and has three consecutive top 10s here with two races where he's led over 100 laps.
That's the one hand when it comes to evaluating Busch this weekend. He's successful in New Hampshire, especially recently, and 16.5 fantasy points is pretty far below the mark that Busch has been getting here. Even with an eighth place finish last year, he had 24.8 points because of the laps led.
The other hand is that 2020 has been a rough-ish year for Busch. He's ninth in points after five years in a row finishing top four in the standings. He hasn't won yet, even though he's never run a full year without winning a race. He's on track for a pretty big drop off in top 10s.
But he's still shown speed. He's on a streak of getting a top 10 every other race, and he led 52 laps at Kansas before finishing 11th. Busch is slumping, but he's not slumping to the degree where you can write him off at one of his best race tracks. I debated this one a lot with myself, but I'm taking the over on Kyle Busch. I can't deny his success here.
As for Chase Elliott, the case for him not hitting 16.5 points is that he finished fifth here once. In his other five starts, his best finish is 11th, and while he led 23 laps in that fifth place finish, he's only led one lap in any other race here. That means that in six starts here, he's hit 16.5 points once, and in that race he finished with 18.3, so he didn't even really blow past that mark.
His best mark outside of that was 10 fantasy points, twice. I'm just not confident in Elliott somehow breaking out of his Loudon slump this week, and while you could argue that he's "due" for a good run after finishing outside of the top 10 in six of the last seven races, I think betting money on a athletes being "due" is usually just some kind of fruitless chase.
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