Fantasy Pick'Em: 2010 Autism Speaks 400

The Monster Mile, Dover International Speedway, will play host to this weekend’s Sprint Cup Series race, the Autism Speaks 400. Taken last year by Jimmie Johnson after an impressive pass of Tony Stewart with three laps to go, this is the last points-paying event before the All-Star festivities at Charlotte.

One of this week’s biggest headlines has been Rick Hendrick’s claim that Joe Gibbs Racing has "lapped" his Hendrick Motorsports team. This isn’t the case at Dover however; three Hendrick drivers have an average finish at least four points better than that of Kyle Busch, Gibbs’ top Dover driver, whose average is a middling 16.9. Team leader Denny Hamlin has taken the fight to Johnson elsewhere this season, but horrible luck at Dover has given him four finishes outside of the top 35 in eight starts.

So if not the Gibbs drivers, who do you pick at Dover?

I’m going with Carl Edwards. Assuming that he won’t visit victory lane ever again is kind of a stretch, even if he hasn’t been a serious threat since that wild ride at Talladega last year. Edwards is exceptional at Dover, his average finish of 7.9 in 11 starts buoyed by seven top-10s and a win. Those other four races? No worse than 18^th. He hasn’t failed to complete a lap in his last nine starts.

Martin Truex Jr. is my dark horse, though he’s certainly a middling driver at the track, with the lone exception of his dominant spring 2007 win. Three top-10s are offset by three finishes outside of the top 20, for an average finish of 15.2. It’s decent, but you can find better; then again, Truex’s team has used their "NAPA Know How" to put together a string of solid runs recently, putting them a mere 16 points out of the Chase. A Dover win could propel Truex into the playoffs just as it did three years ago.

Three more concrete warriors to consider:

Johnson has five wins in 16 Dover starts. That’s equal to the amount of sub-10^th place finishes he has, and even then, three of those were top-15s. He also swept the track last year, leading 298 and 271 laps respectively on the way to his two victories. I’m not picking him for the sake of remaining interesting.

Jeff Gordon is long overdue for a win, and everybody knows it—the DuPont team should not be 40 races between trips to victory lane right now, especially given how strong they’ve been the past two weeks. Gordon’s accrued four wins and 21 top-10s in 34 Dover starts, though three of the wins came in 1995 and 1996, and only one came in a 400-mile event. The past four years have seen Gordon finish 12^th or better in seven out of eight starts, with a total of 114 laps led.

Finally, four-time Dover winner Mark "The Kid" Martin gets a look for the consistency he’s shown at Dover since 2004. He doesn’t lead many laps, and hasn’t led in triple digits since last millennium, but going to Dover both times every year (even in his limited schedules) has kept him sharp at the oval. In 10 of his last 12 starts, he’s been in the top ten when the checkered flag fell; the other finishes were 14^th and 23^rd, not too shabby. Martin was the runner-up in the fall race, something he’s done seven times at the track.