DIRTRACKR Daily Podcast - Episode Transcript
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Carson Macedo has all but erased Brad Sweet's World of Outlaws points lead | Daily 6-28-2022
Coming up, Kyle Larson can't match Brent Marks at Lincoln, we look at tight championships with the Outlaws and Lucas, and how bad and good my win picks have been this season. Let's go!
Today is Tuesday, June 28th, two thousand and twenty two. Welcome into DIRTRACKR Daily. I'm Justin Fiedler.
The third round of Pennsylvania Speedweek is complete, with Brent Marks picking up the win last night at Lincoln Speedway. It's not often you see Kyle Larson start on the pole of a sprint car race and get run down for the win, but that's exactly what Marks did. He started the feature from the 13th position, but was already fourth by lap five. Past half way he was too Larson's tail tank, and he took the lead for good with 11 laps remaining. Strong stuff from Marks and that 19 team. Larson settled for second, with Anthony Macri rounding out the podium. It was a nice finish as well for Troy Wagaman, who ended up fourth after starting second. I was a little surprised by some of the names who weren't in the feature last night, including Freddie Rahmer, Devin Borden, and Paul McMahan. None of those guys were able to move forward and grab transfer spots in the night's B-Main. Headed to Grandview tonight, Macri leads the Speedweek points over Marks and Justin Peck with three nights complete. Macri so far has two wins and a third, and the gap back to Marks is 62 points. Right now it looks like Marks and Peck are the only two really within striking distance right now. Larson and Christopher Bell will be back in the field again tonight. If you want to watch, SprintCarUnlimited.TV has the pay per view stream.
Looking around the big series this morning, I wanted to point out a few drivers for you in regards to their recent performances. We'll start with Tanner English. The Kentucky driver is currently up to third in the World of Outlaws Late Model Series standings and it's been a nice few weeks for him. He picked up a Summer Nationals win last Thursday night, and a string of good finishes with the Outlaws have him challenging Max Blair for second. He started out this year pretty quiet with the Outlaws, but has gained ground in recent weeks. Over his last ten races, he has eight top tens and an average finish of 8.1. He's still looking for an Outlaw win and some laps led this year, but he's moving forward in features a lot, and recent fourth place runs show he can be in the mix.
On the sprint car side with the Outlaws, Carson Macedo is back on the heels of Brad Sweet for the points lead. I mentioned on yesterday's show that he's only 12 points behind now, which is about six positions. It could be even less than that with some more wins. Remember that Macedo was light at the scales following Williams Grove in May, and was pushed back to a 26th place finish. If he would have kept his podium finish from that night, the points lead would have been his. But instead, the penalty seemed to have sent that JJR 41 team reeling a bit, because they followed the Grove with three finishes outside the top ten in their next four races and tumbled down the top five. But since a 13th at Lawrenceburg on May 30th, they have nine straight top tens, which includes wins at River Cities and last Friday at Huset's. Macedo tops the series in average finish over the last ten races, and is tied with Sheldon Haudenschild in that category over the last five races. Things could get real spicy this weekend with Cedar Lake on tap, and that points lead for Sweet is precarious at best. Macedo has five straight top tens at the track, including seconds in both races there last year. Incredibly, Sweet has five straight wins at Cedar Lake, but that KKR 49 has not had that same pace this year with only the one win, and that was 21 races ago. This will be a good chance for Macedo to really turn up the heat for the Outlaw championship.
Speaking of championships, the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series is setting up for a good battle as well. Tim McCreadie has found his stride and is suddenly only 25 points behind Brandon Sheppard. McCreadie's last ten Lucas races include nine top tens, an average finish of 6.1 and two wins. BShepp hasn't been bad over that stretch, but McCreadie has just been better. These two drivers are both known for their consistency, so this will be something to keep an eye on in the coming weeks.
And with USAC, Brady Bacon is all the way back to second in the standings after getting behind right away in Florida to start the year. Finishes of 15th and 16th at Bubba left him with a hole to climb out of in search of his third straight title, but that gap has all but disappeared. In the 12 races since that second night in Florida, Bacon has four wins and 11 top tens. With a packed month of July looming for the USAC sprint cars, Justin Grant's lead over Bacon is just 11 points. If you want to see more stats like these I've just talked about, find your way to dirtrackr.com/analytics.
If you watch or listen regularly, you know that I've been doing win picks all season, with each race getting a selection from the dirtrackr.com analytics prediction formula and one from me. So far, we've done picks for 128 races, and right now I have a pretty substantial lead on the formula. The formula did pretty well early on this season, but it has struggled lately. It did correctly pick Brandon Sheppard to win Sunday at Jacksonville. So through those 128 races, it has just 14 correct picks, or about 11%. I had three right selections over the weekend, including both Dennis Erb Jr. wins at Pevely, and Tim McCreadie winning the Firecracker 100. That brings my tally to 29 correct winners, which is a little more than 22.5%. I will probably finish the season as is, but I have some ideas for the win prediction formula for the future to make it better. I've toyed with the idea of turning the win predictor live at dirtrackr.com, but there are some issues with it, most notably that the formula obviously doesn't know who's racing each night. And unless we wait until after teams have signed in, which isn't realistic, there isn't a way to just have the formula choose from a certain set of available drivers. I do need to try and find a solution for that if it does eventually go live.
Six shows on the streaming schedule today. DIRTVision has the Summer Nationals from Red Hill and weekly outlaw karts from Millbridge. Speed Sport has micros from Circus City and action from Buena Vista. Sprint Car Unlimited as Pennsylvania Speedweek from Grandview, and there is FloRacing 24/7. To see the full daily streaming schedule with links to watch, visit dirtrackr.com/watchtonight.
That's it for the show today, have a good Tuesday. If you have thoughts about the topics on today's show, leave them in the comments below or tweet at me.
Thanks everybody for tuning in, I'll see you tomorrow for more DIRTRACKR Daily!