DraftKings NASCAR DFS Picks for Mexico City: Fantasy NASCAR Strategy and Picks for the Viva México 250

The NASCAR Cup Series contests its first race overseas in decades with the Viva México 250 at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez.

The Mexico City track is a 15-turn road course that’s 2.417 miles in length, putting this in a category comparable to the Indy Road course that the Cup Series ran from 2021-2023.

Drivers had two practice sessions Friday to get used to the track and tune up their cars, and while practice FLAGS will be important, we also need to give heavy consideration to strategy, which always plays a premium at road courses.

Also, check out my NASCAR projections in the NASCAR Models on FantasyLabs, complete with floor, ceiling, median, and ownership projections.

My projections, along with Stephen Young’s from RotoGrinders, are available in our new NASCAR DFS package. You can read more about what the package entails here.

Let’s not skip the best part — my Perfect% metric — a metric that tells you how often certain racers appear in the optimal lineup when running 10,000 race simulations.

And don’t forget about the tools that FantasyLabs has to offer, like our Lineup Optimizer to effortlessly create up to 300 lineups or our Lineup Builder if you like to hand-build your lineups.

So, without further ado, here’s my strategy guide and NASCAR DFS picks for the Viva México 250 at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez.

Viva México 250 DFS Core Picks

Instead of calling them cash-game picks, I’ll call them core picks, as these are picks I like in all formats. However, it’s important to note that very often core picks tend to go over-rostered in tournaments, so while they should still be used plenty, it may be prudent to sometimes go underweight on these drivers if you think they’ll be significantly over-rostered.

Christopher Bell ($10,200): Bell starts 31st after an interesting qualifying session that ended early due to weather.

Bell is this year’s only road-course winner, winning at Circuit of the Americas (COTA) in the season’s third race.

That means he should be primed to take advantage of up to 30 spots of place-differential potential available to him, especially considering he ranked top-five in FLAGS after ranking sixth in each of the two sessions.

There is a case to be made that Bell will be significantly over-rostered in tournaments, but my model disagrees, putting his ownership and Perfect% within a few percentage points of each other. That means he’s a great play in all formats.

Carson Hocevar ($7500): We might be getting a discount on Hocevar here considering his tremendous form over the last five weeks on the intermediate tracks, but I think he could perform just as well at this road course.

Hocevar was another qualifying victim, but he ranked sixth in overall FLAGS.

Hocevar placed 13th at COTA, and he has finished 13th or better in each of his last three road-course races. If he’s able to replicate those past three results, which is suggested by his practice FLAGS, he’s poised for at least 10 places of place differential.

William Byron ($9900): It’s pretty crazy that Byron is only $9900 given his finishes over the last eight road-course races; aside from two DNFs, have all been eighth or better, including two wins and two runner-up finishes.

Add in a 27th-place starting position, and Byron joins Bell and Hocevar in the place-differential category of drivers that are core plays.

If I remove two questionable laps from Byron that I left in, he’d jump from 13th in practice FLAGS to ninth, and intuitively it makes sense that those two laps were probably a bit compromised by traffic, although I don’t have any way to confirm this.

Viva México 250 Tournament Picks

Ryan Blaney ($7200): I’m shocked at Blaney’s $7200 price tag, because while he’s not known as a road-course ace, he’s still finished between seventh and 13th in seven of his last 10 road-course races.

I was also impressed by Blaney’s car in practice, where he ranked 18th overall, but more importantly he was second in the second practice session.

I’d almost discount that first practice session where he fell off pretty hard because the second session was so drastically better and came over 10 usable laps, which is a lot for a nearly 2.5-mile road course.

In fact, of the drivers that had at least 10 usable laps in the second session, Blaney was No. 1 in speed over those 10 laps.

The winning driver: Well duh.

But here’s the thing, we probably only get to target one major race winner here given that there’s only 100 laps, meaning probably only around 60-70 total dominator points to split among all the drivers in the race.

That means place differential will rule the day, so we can’t stuff in all the race favorites into our lineups, especially because most start toward the front, which means little-to-no place differential.

So you’ll definitely want exposure to Shane van Gisbergen, Ross Chastain, and Ty Gibbs, but it’s going to be hard to stuff more than one of them into a winning lineup.

So you’ll probably want to create a group of these three drivers and use the rule “at most one” of these drivers for the vast majority of your lineups.

Watch the weather: There is rain in the forecast, but it’s not a slam dunk and we could be playing the watching game up until green flag on whether we’ll have any pop-up rain or not.

One notable change for me would be to Austin Cindric ($8000), who has really struggled in wet weather conditions at road courses, but otherwise he’s a solid road-course racer who posted the 10th-best practice FLAGS, including fifth in the final session.

He’s a driver you could be either overweight on (dry) or underweight on (wet) based off the conditions.

Strategy: There’s a few drivers inside the playoff cutline that could be points racing, which would hurt their potential to get a strong finish. They are:

• Kyle Busch
• Ryan Preece
• Alex Bowman
• Chris Buescher
• Chase Briscoe
• Bubba Wallace

My model can’t really handle scenarios like this, because they are rare enough to not build up statistical significance, but it’s possible these drivers may be over-projected in Perfect% if they choose the stage-points racing strategy rather than the optimal finishing strategy.

Expect the unexpected: I don’t really feel like I have great advice for this race because it’s at a new track, at an interesting time in the playoff picture, and has potential rain in the forecast.

This is a fantastic week to lower your overall volume, or if you do play high volume, to possibly get quite contrarian.

My best recommendation would be to use my projections to find leverage spots, especially if you bump down the names I listed in the strategy section and bump Cindric either up or down depending on the weather.

That should give you some solid overall leverage to where you can use the optimizer to set some lineups, while keeping in mind lineup choices/rules for the race favorites.