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Justin Carter's NASCAR Cup Series DFS lineup picks for DraftKings, FanDuel for the Yellawood 500 at Talladega. Read our fantasy NASCAR picks.
The NASCAR Cup Series heads to Talladega on Sunday for one of the most chaotic races of the playoffs. The drafting and pack racing at Talladega often leads to unexpected results. Will we see one of the 12 remaining playoff drivers win? Or will we get our first non-playoff winner of the 2023 playoffs?
The race here in April was relatively calm until the final 50 laps. From there, four multi-car crashes shook up the field, which led to some unexpected results, like a top five for Chase Briscoe and a 10th for Todd Gilliland.
Below are my NASCAR DFS lineup picks for the AutoTrader Yellawood 500 on DraftKings and FanDuel this week. This slate locks on 10/1/23 at 2:02 PM ET. If you have any questions or want to talk about NASCAR, you can find me on Twitter at @juscarts.
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Chris Buescher
Starts 24th - DK: $10,000, FD: $13,000
Before we talk about the drivers, let's talk strategy. At Talladega, place differential is the king. Big crashes lead to a finishing order that's impossible to predict, so you want to avoid having too many drivers who start near the front, since those drivers can lose you so many points with a bad finish. In this race last fall, just three drivers who started in the top 10 finished there. This spring, that number jumped to four, but we also saw four drivers start 20th or worse who finished with a top 10.
Alright, onto the drivers now, starting with Chris Buescher, who has three top 10s at Talladega, including a third-place run here earlier this year. That's part of what's been a strong 2023 for Buescher on drafting tracks. He was fourth in the Daytona 500, then led five laps before crashing in the first Atlanta race. Then was the aforementioned Talladega, followed by another Atlanta race where he led 29 laps before finishing 15th.
Then, of course, was the Daytona night race, where Buescher finally won a Cup race on a superspeedway. Can he follow that up with another on Sunday?
Chase Elliott
Starts 23rd - DK: $9,300, FD: $11,500
It feels like I mention this every week at this point, but Chase Elliott is still searching for his first win of the year. He's finally started to find his stride, with five finishes in a row of 11th or better. But he just hasn't put together a full race. He led 47 laps at Kansas, but ended up sixth.
Maybe Talladega will be what Elliott needs. He's a two-time winner here and has seven top 10s in 15 career starts. He was 12th here in the spring, leading 18 laps in the process. That was the seventh time he's led double-digit laps at this track.
Ross Chastain
Starts 32nd - DK: $8,800, FD: $9,500
Ross Chastain, the 2022 spring winner here, starts way back in 32nd, making him one of the top plays on this slate. He's historically run well here, even if he's got just a 22.2% rate of getting top 10s. Two of those have come in his three starts at Talladega for Trackhouse.
Chastain routinely finds himself up front, though. He's led at least one lap here six times. That includes the 36 he led in this lap last year, as well as the time he led nine laps here in a Premium Motorsports car. That's not something you see every day—those Premium cars weren't great!
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Kyle Busch
Starts 25th - DK: $8,700, FD: $10,000
Kyle Busch won here earlier in the year. Of course, superspeedways are so unpredictable that that likely doesn't really mean a ton. He led just three laps.
But Busch seems to find himself up front a lot here. While he's only finished in the top 10 in 27.8% of his Talladega starts, he's led at least one lap in nine of the last 10 races here. One way to survive the Talladega carnage is to get out front, and Busch has been out front here plenty of times.
I don't expect him to have a dominant performance or anything, as he hasn't led double-digit laps here since 2017. But I do expect him to put himself in position for a strong finish.
Corey LaJoie
Starts 36th - DK: $6,200, FD: $4,200
Corey LaJoie starts way back in 36th in the Spire 7 car. He's had some struggles lately, with four finishes in a row outside the top 20, but he was 10th at Daytona back in August, the most recent superspeedway race that the Cup Series has had.
LaJoie hasn't had great results at Talladega in his career, with just one top 10 here, which came back in 2019. But he's managed to be around at the end of races, which is a good sign if things get chaotic. He's finished on the lead lap in four of his five starts here for Spire.
Carson Hocevar
Starts 38th - DK: $5,900, FD: $4,800
Carson Hocevar, who is heavily rumored to run the Cup Series full-time next year for Spire, gets another start for Legacy Motor Club this weekend.
In September, Hocevar made four Cup Series starts. He finished between 11th and 20th in all of them and looked like a contender at times during the Bristol race, where he posted 22 fastest laps.
The only real troubling thing here is a lack of superspeedway starts in the Cup Series. But Hocevar does have three Talladega starts in the Truck Series, including on Saturday, when he led five laps and finished 11th despite being involved in two cautions during the final stretch of the race.
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