The People’s Facts – Gillette Fusion ProGlide 500

There’s still a few hours for you, the Internet, to help your favorite fantasy NASCAR team pick its lineup for this Sunday’s race. For those of you still trying to make up your minds about which drivers to pick, here’s some information about where they will be driving.

Track basics. Pocono Raceway holds many titles, including Closest Track to New York City (for whatever that’s worth). It also would win any contest to determine the track with the weirdest format. Most non-road-course tracks aspire to be either a circle or an oval. The 2.5 mile Pocono track is what your geometry teacher would call a scalene triangle. Instead of two pairs of fairly symetrical turns, drivers must prepare for three distinct types of turns. Prepare for only two of them, and something like this can happen.

Recent winners. Tony Stewart (2009), Kasey Kahne (2008), Jeff Gordon (2007).

Who wins here a lot. Stop this blog if you’ve heard this one before: Gordon leads active NASCAR Sprint Cup drivers with four victories on this track. Denny Hamlin and Bobby Labonte (remember him?) are tied with three wins apiece.

Now, a personal note. Pocono Raceway is one of only two tracks where the people who bring you the People’s Pigskin have actually watched a NASCAR Sprint Cup race live, the other one being Las Vegas.

Two of the many things that struck me about the experience of a Pocono weekend: The ARCA race — which, for reasons that may never be fully understood, was the only race paired with the Sprint Cup race that weekend — could have put an insomniac to sleep, and the environment around the track that weekend was mind-blowing. For you football fans, it was like a three-day tailgate party with a couple of races thrown in.

Plus, it offered photo opportunities like the one below.

Picture those flags multiplied by about ten thousand.

You probably know this by now, but Yahoo Sports offers a fuller fantasy preview of this race. (Click here to download the PDF.) And we’re back to our usual poll schedule. The lineup polls will close Thursday night to allow us to submit a lineup in time for Friday’s qualifying session. We’ll be back with the results and a fresh poll.