A Quick Halftime Assessment

The lineup polls for the People’s Pitstop‘s roster for Saturday night’s NASCAR Sprint Cup race in Chicago will close later tonight. Feel free to vote in the polls before you read the rest of this post. That’s fine. We’ll wait.

(Humming the Jeopardy! theme)

OK, now let’s look at the first half of this fantasy NASCAR experiment. We’ve had our up weeks and our down weeks. But we’ve sure had some fun along the way.

Best. Week. Ever. (OK, for the first half of the NASCAR season, anyway.) Let’s set the Wayback Machine back to week 3 in Las Vegas. The Internet’s favorite fantasy racing team racked up a season-high 342 points. Fueling the way was Jimmie Johnson, who got the second of his five wins so far this season.

The week that wasn’t so good. Four races after we hit our high, we dipped into the valley in the Valley of the Sun. In week 7 in Phoenix, the People’s Pitstop got a season-low 214 points. Johnson crossed the finish line in third place. That was the good news. The bad news is that we left him on our bench.

Speaking of the bench… The voters in the People’s Pitstop polls managed to pick the winner of the race six times in the first half of the season. Unfortunately, four of those winners sat on our bench. Johnson won three times as a member of our team, but two of those times he was riding the pine. The lesson? Vote carefully.

Who’s popular with the voters? Four drivers have made seven starts each for the People’s Pitstop. Surprisingly, none of them come from the A List. Three come from the B List (Kevin Harvick, Jeff Burton, Matt Kenseth), and the fourth comes from the C List (Paul Menard).

Hello? We’re eligible, you know. Another surprise: The A List, which is supposed to include the best drivers NASCAR has to offer, has two drivers still waiting for their first start: Carl Edwards and Juan Pablo Montoya.

Maybe the voters are saving them for the fall push.

Remember to vote while you still can. We’ll be back with the results.