Labor Day Classic 500 Race Preview

Atlanta Motor Speedway -- 09/5/2010

Author: Jed Henson

Published: Wednesday Sep 1 2010 11:13am

This week the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series returns to Georgia for a run at Atlanta Motor Speedway (AMS). AMS is a 1.5-mile, D-shaped track with 24 degrees of progressive banking. These specs make AMS very similar to the tracks in Charlotte, Texas and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Las Vegas. We already have decent practice, qualifying and race data from all three of these tracks this year, plus the data from the Atlanta race in March, and I think that allows us to get a very good handle on who should run well on Sunday.

Handicapping Atlanta II
I crunched the 2010 Las Vegas, Atlanta, Texas and Charlotte data to produce initial driver rankings, and then merged those results with the rankings produced by running just the Atlanta data (thereby tilting the results toward the Atlanta numbers). I came up with a top 10 I feel pretty good about:

1. Kasey Kahne
2. Kurt Busch
3. Jimmie Johnson
4. Dale Earnhardt Jr.
5. Ryan Newman
6.....

Full Article Here