How NASCAR DFS Scoring Works (DraftKings & FanDuel)

I have built NASCAR DFS lineups for years, and the single thing that separates people who cash from people who donate is not their driver opinions. It is whether they actually understand how the points are scored. NASCAR is the one DFS sport where you can roster a driver who finishes 18th and have him outscore the guy who finished 6th, and if you do not know why that happens, you are guessing. So before you build a single lineup, let me walk you through exactly how NASCAR DFS scoring works on DraftKings and FanDuel, and why the scoring system itself is the strategy.

In Summary (TL;DR)

• Place differential is the engine of NASCAR DFS. You earn points for every position a driver gains from where he started, so a driver who starts 30th and finishes 10th banks 20 positions of value the field had to pay nothing for.
• Dominator points are the other half. On DraftKings you score for laps led and fastest laps, and a huge share of the total points on the board funnels to the two or three drivers who control the race up front.
• DraftKings rewards both lanes; FanDuel leans on finishing position. FanDuel weights place differential far lighter and does not award a dominator-style laps-led/fastest-laps category, so where a driver finishes is most of the story on FanDuel.
• The scoring is why the build looks the way it does. A winning DraftKings roster is usually one or two expensive dominators paired with cheap, deep-starting place-differential plays. FanDuel pushes you toward overall finishing ability. (Our full NASCAR DFS strategy guide covers the build step by step.)
• Want the tool to do the math? The Stokastic NASCAR Sims project laps led, fastest laps, and finish for every driver and simulate the whole contest so you can see which build actually wins.

The Two Ways You Score Points in NASCAR DFS

Every NASCAR DFS lineup is six drivers under a salary cap, and your score is the sum of those six drivers' fantasy points. Those points come from two completely different sources, and understanding the split is the whole game:

1. Finishing and position points. What a driver does relative to where he started and where he ends up.
2. Dominator points. Laps led and fastest laps, which reward the handful of drivers who actually control the race.

A useful way to think about it: there is a roughly fixed pool of fantasy points awarded in every race, with only small variation based on how many caution laps eat into the fastest-lap pool. Your job is not to "find points." It is to figure out which six drivers will capture the largest slice of that fixed pool, and to do it differently enough from the field to win a tournament. Get the scoring right and the whole sport opens up.

Place Differential: The Core NASCAR DFS Edge

Place differential is the points you earn for finishing better than you started. Start 30th, finish 10th, and you gain 20 positions. Each of those gained positions is worth fantasy points on both sites. This is the mechanic that makes NASCAR DFS unlike any other DFS sport, and it is the first thing to internalize.

On DraftKings, every position gained is worth +1 fantasy point, and every position lost is −1. On FanDuel, the same movement is worth half as much, +/−0.5 points per position. So a driver who climbs from 30th to 10th banks +20 on DraftKings but only +10 on FanDuel off the exact same drive. That single difference is the first reason the two sites reward different lineups, and we come back to it below.

Here is why it is the core edge and not just a quirk. Starting position in NASCAR is not random and it is not always earned. On weeks without traditional qualifying, the starting grid is often set by a formula tied to team performance and the prior race, which means strong drivers can be buried deep in the field through no fault of their own. The market prices drivers heavily on talent and finishing ability, so a genuinely good driver who happens to start 28th is frequently underpriced for the points he is about to gain just by climbing back to where he belongs. As one of our NASCAR strategy shows put it while building a Darlington lineup: moving up from a worse starting spot is "seven more spots of place differential" baked in before the green flag even drops.

That is the edge. You are not paying for finishing position; you are paying for talent, and the starting grid hands you the position points for free.

Why Starting Position Matters So Much

Because place differential is measured from the start, where a driver begins the race changes his entire DFS value, even if his raw ability is unchanged. The same driver is a great play starting 30th and a poor play starting 4th, because from 4th there are only three positions to gain and a lot of positions to lose.

This is most extreme at superspeedways like Talladega and Daytona. The restrictor-plate package levels the field so the worst-funded teams can run with the best, and wrecks are common: across recent Geico 500 runnings at Talladega, roughly 35% of the field has ended up in an accident, versus something closer to 10% for a driver at a normal intermediate track. When a third of the field crashes out, drivers who started near the back and simply survive can rocket up the running order on cautions and bank enormous place differential without ever running a "good" race. That is why deep-starting punts flood superspeedway lineups, and why the safe-looking front-runner is often a trap: he has nowhere to gain and everywhere to fall.

The takeaway is not "always play the back of the grid." It is that starting position is an input to scoring, not a side note, and you read every driver through it.

Dominator Points: Where the Race Is Won Up Front

If place differential is the value lane, dominator points are the ceiling lane. On DraftKings you score for two things only the leaders accumulate:

• Laps led. Points for every lap a driver spends out front.
• Fastest laps. Points for posting the fastest lap of a given lap during the race.

On DraftKings, each lap led is worth +0.25 points and each fastest lap is worth +0.45 points. Fastest-lap points are not awarded under caution (the field is frozen), which is why the dominator pool shrinks in caution-heavy races. Those numbers look small until you remember a race runs a couple hundred laps: lead 150 of them and that is 37.5 points from laps led alone, before a single fastest lap or position gained.

The thing to understand is how concentrated these points are. A points-paying race might run a couple hundred laps, and the drivers who lead and post fastest laps are usually just two or three names. So a meaningful chunk of the entire fixed point pool gets vacuumed up by a tiny group at the front. We call those drivers "dominators," and on DraftKings they are expensive on purpose: a top dominator routinely costs north of $10,000 of your salary, because the projection system knows he is in line to bank laps-led and fastest-lap points nobody else can touch.

That concentration is exactly why our strategy shows keep coming back to the same DraftKings frame: most winning rosters are built around one or two dominators, with an eye on whether a third is even gettable. As one Coca-Cola 600 build put it, you start your lineup with the dominators "and you weren't looking to get crazy," then work down to the place-differential plays from there. The dominators set your ceiling; the place-differential plays make the salary work.

There is a tradeoff worth respecting. Dominators are higher-variance than they look: if a leader wrecks, he does not just lose the finish, he stops accruing the laps-led points you paid up for. Our shows have flagged exactly this, noting that "dominators don't score well" on the nights the leaders fall out, while the place-differential guys "are a lot more reliable" because climbing the order does not require leading a single lap. So you pay up for the ceiling with your eyes open.

New to Stokastic? You do not have to estimate laps led, fastest laps, and finish by hand. The Stokastic NASCAR Sims project all three scoring inputs for every driver, then simulate the full contest tens of thousands of times so you can see which dominator-plus-place-differential builds actually win, not just which lineup has the highest single projection. New users get a free 7-day trial, and code NASCAR10 takes 10% off your first Stokastic+ payment: Start your free trial.

DraftKings vs FanDuel NASCAR Scoring: The Differences That Matter

The same six drivers can produce very different lineups depending on the site, because DraftKings and FanDuel score the race differently. This is the part most casual players miss, and it is where edges live.

DraftKings rewards all three buckets in a balanced way:

• Finishing position: 45 points for the win, 42 for second, then about a point per position down (with small bonuses at 30th, 20th, and 10th) to 1 point for 40th.
• Place differential at full weight: +1 per position gained, −1 per position lost.
• Dominator points: 0.25 per lap led and 0.45 per fastest lap.

Because all three matter, a DraftKings build genuinely needs both lanes: dominators for the laps-led/fastest-lap ceiling, and deep-starting place-differential plays to fill out the cap. Both kinds of drivers can land in the optimal lineup.

FanDuel is a different animal:

• Finishing position is the dominant input. The winner scores 43 points, second 40, third 38, then about a point per position down to 1 point for 40th.
• Place differential is half DraftKings' weight: 0.5 points per position gained or lost.
• No fastest-lap points at all, and laps led pays just 0.1 per lap (with another 0.1 per lap completed) — so there is no real dominator lane the way DraftKings has one.

Put those together and FanDuel barely rewards the front-runner's dominance: leading 150 laps is worth 15 points on FanDuel versus 37.5 on DraftKings, and there is no fastest-lap bonus on top. The expensive DraftKings dominator is often a far weaker FanDuel play.

The practical effect is large. On FanDuel, where a driver finishes is most of the story, so the projections re-sort: drivers who start mid-pack and finish well climb your board, while a deep-starting punt who relies almost entirely on place differential is worth a lot less than he is on DraftKings. Our Talladega game plan called this out directly. A driver like Ricky Stenhouse Jr. graded out noticeably better on FanDuel than on DraftKings the same week, purely because of how the two sites weight the buckets. Same driver, same race, different scoring, different play.

So the rule is simple: build for the scoring system in front of you. Do not copy a DraftKings lineup onto FanDuel and assume it is optimal. The dominator you paid up for on DraftKings may not justify his FanDuel salary, and the deep punt you loved on DraftKings loses a chunk of his value when place differential is halved.

How Scoring Drives Roster Construction

Once the scoring clicks, NASCAR lineup construction stops feeling like a mystery, because the build is just a response to where the points are.

On DraftKings, the canonical shape is dominators plus place-differential punts:

• One or two dominators up top. These are your expensive front-runners (often $10,000+), there for laps led and fastest laps. They set your ceiling.
• Cheap, deep-starting place-differential plays to fill the cap. Genuinely capable drivers stuck starting far back, there to climb the order and bank position points the field underpaid for.
• A read on whether a third dominator is worth it versus spending that salary on more place differential. This is a real decision point our shows debate every week.

On FanDuel, you tilt toward overall finishing ability and lean less on the deep punts, because halved place differential and no dominator category mean a driver's projected finish carries the lineup.

A couple of guardrails that follow straight from the scoring:

• This is tournament-leaning advice. The dominator-plus-punt, leverage-aware build is a GPP approach, where getting different from the field and chasing a high ceiling is the point. For cash games (double-ups, 50/50s) you are trying to beat roughly half the field, so you want the highest-floor build from projections rather than a contrarian tournament pool. Do not run the same lineup in both.
• Ownership and leverage decide tournaments. Because the place-differential mechanic is well known, the obvious cheap deep-starters get heavily owned, and "if you just stack up the back of the race it's gonna be heavily duplicated." Getting meaningfully under the field on a high-upside driver, rather than fading good drivers blindly, is how you avoid a duplicated lineup and a split prize.

This article is the scoring primer. For the full build, including track-type adjustments, ownership and leverage, and the step-by-step lineup process, read our NASCAR DFS strategy guide. When you are ready to put it into a simulator, see how the NASCAR Sims build and optimize lineups.

A Worked Example: Reading One Driver Through the Scoring

Make it concrete with one real situation from a Talladega Geico 500 build. The board had Christopher Bell as the best overall driver carrying a poor starting spot, so he "plugs into any lineup," combining a strong place-differential ceiling with dominator upside. The interesting part was the contrast with the front of the grid.

A front-running favorite at a superspeedway looks safe and is actually a scoring trap: starting up front, he has almost no place differential to gain, and at a track where about a third of the field wrecks, he has real downside. Meanwhile a capable driver buried near the back has 20-plus positions of place differential available before he runs a single "good" lap, and if a late caution bunches the field, he can finish near the front on the lead lap. That is why the show leaned toward a balanced shape (a couple of drivers up front for dominator/finishing points, a couple mid-pack, and a couple deep for place differential) rather than naively stacking the back, which the whole field was already doing.

Notice what is doing the work in that decision: not gut feel about who is "good," but the scoring math. Place differential available, dominator points available, crash risk, and how heavily owned the obvious plays will be. That is the entire skill.

How the Stokastic Sims Turn Scoring Into Lineups

The reason all of this is hard to do by hand is that you are estimating three moving scoring inputs (laps led, fastest laps, and finish) across 30-plus drivers, for two sites that weight them differently, while accounting for crash risk and ownership. That is what the Stokastic NASCAR Sims are for.

The tool surfaces each driver's projected laps led, fastest laps, and finishing distribution, converts those into site-specific DraftKings and FanDuel scoring, and then simulates the entire contest tens of thousands of times. Instead of building the single highest-projected lineup, you build by win probability across all those simulated outcomes, and the Sims construct and optimize the lineups for you, bulk-building your pool with exposure controls and folding in correlation, ownership, and leverage automatically. You also get Projections, Ownership Projections, a Top Stacks read, and the Live Before Lock show, all using the same scoring logic this article just walked through. The scoring is the foundation; the Sims do the arithmetic at scale.

New to Stokastic? Stokastic projects laps led, fastest laps, and finish for every NASCAR driver, scores them the DraftKings and FanDuel way automatically, and simulates the whole contest so you can see which build actually wins. Try it free for 7 days, and use code NASCAR10 for 10% off your first Stokastic+ payment: Start your free trial.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does NASCAR DFS scoring work on DraftKings?

DraftKings scores three things: finishing position, place differential (points for every position a driver gains from where he started), and dominator points from laps led and fastest laps. A balanced DraftKings build pairs one or two expensive dominators with cheap, deep-starting place-differential plays.

How does NASCAR DFS scoring work on FanDuel?

FanDuel scores finishing position most heavily, weights place differential at roughly half of DraftKings', and does not award a DraftKings-style laps-led/fastest-laps dominator category. The result is that a driver's overall finishing ability carries a FanDuel lineup more than place differential does. Always confirm the current values on FanDuel's live scoring page.

What is place differential in NASCAR DFS?

Place differential is the points you earn for finishing better than you started: gain 20 positions (start 30th, finish 10th) and you bank 20 positions of value. Because the market prices drivers on talent rather than starting spot, a strong driver stuck deep in the field is often underpriced for the positions he is about to gain.

What are dominator points in NASCAR DFS?

Dominator points are the laps-led and fastest-lap points that the two or three drivers controlling the race accumulate. A large share of the fixed point pool funnels to these front-runners, which is why they carry the highest salaries and set your lineup's ceiling.

Why does starting position matter so much in NASCAR DFS?

Because place differential is measured from the start, the same driver is a strong play starting 30th and a weak play starting 4th. A deep starter has many positions to gain; a front starter has almost none to gain and many to lose, which makes him risky despite looking safe.

Is the scoring the same on DraftKings and FanDuel?

No. DraftKings rewards finishing, place differential, and dominator points fairly evenly, while FanDuel leans on finishing position and weights place differential lighter with no dominator category. Build for the site in front of you rather than copying a lineup across sites.

The Bottom Line

NASCAR DFS scoring is not complicated once you see the two engines: place differential rewards drivers who climb from a deep start, and dominator points reward the few who lead laps and post fastest laps up front. DraftKings pays both lanes, which is why the classic build is dominators plus place-differential punts; FanDuel leans on finishing position, which re-sorts the board entirely. Learn the scoring and the lineup builds itself.

When you want the projections, the scoring math, and the contest simulations done for you, that is what Stokastic is for. Stokastic projects laps led, fastest laps, and finish for every driver, scores them the DraftKings and FanDuel way, and simulates the full contest so you can build by win probability. Try it free for 7 days, and code NASCAR10 takes 10% off your first Stokastic+ payment: Start your free trial.