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With six races left in the season the NASCAR Cup Series heads to Talladega Alabama this weekend. Talladega Superspeedway is the largest oval on the NASCAR schedule. The track is a 2.66-mile tri-oval with extreme banking. In the turns the track is banked at 33 degrees. The tri-oval has 16.5 degrees of banking. Only the straightaways, at just 2 degrees, are relatively flat.
Talladega only has one true comparable track, Daytona International Speedway. Talladega and Daytona are true pack drafting tracks where the field bunches together to increase overall speed by drafting off each other. Atlanta’s 2022 reconfiguration has introduced significant drafting elements to that track. However the shorter distance and lower banking there gives Atlanta a unique flair. So Atlanta isn’t particularly helpful in projecting Talladega.
Even without using races from Atlanta, we still have plenty of data to work with when projecting this weekend. In 2024 we have three previous races at Daytona (2) and Talladega (1) to use. Also, since individual speed matters less here, we can go back across a bigger period of time to look at overall driver skill. That means we can use the entire Gen 7 period (2022- present). Across the nearly three years of Gen 7 races we now have 11 races to evaluate.
It’s also important to keep in mind that this race is somewhat different from other drafting track races. This is a playoff race, the only true drafting race of the playoffs. Over the past 10 years of the Playoffs, a non-Playoff driver has won this race exactly once. That single win was Bubba Wallace in the rain-shortened 2021 race. In fact, playoff drivers have finished the race 1-2 in five of the last 10 races.
Kyle Larson does not normally come to mind when we think of elite drivers at drafting tracks. If we only look at his results, this makes sense. In the 11 Gen 7 races at Daytona and Talladega, Larson has just 1 Top 10 finish. Larson finished 4th at the first Talladega race in 2022. In fact, he has only finished five of the 11 Gen 7 drafting races on the lead lap.
Larson’s poor finishes have been more bad luck than poor driving, though. While survival is a skill at these tracks, even the best drivers get caught up in wrecks that are not of their own making. Larson’s poor results are covering up some good racing before incidents.
If we look at Front Runners from Win The Race, we see that Larson has spent more of his laps completed inside the Top 10 than any other Cup Series driver in the 11 Gen 7 races at Daytona and Talladega. Larson also has the third-best weighted average running position, behind only Kyle Busch and Chase Elliott. Simply put, Larson hasn’t gotten great finishes, but he has been running towards the front of these races.
Looking to 2024 we can see that Larson has continued to run towards the front. His laps completed in the Top 10 for 2024 are down slightly, to 41.48%. Larson has done a great job of staying alive though. He has completed almost every single lap at Daytona and Talladega in 2024. Larson has only failed to complete one lap, the final lap of the Summer Daytona race. His 41.48% Top 10 laps is also still the second best among Chevy drivers.
Sooner or later, I expect the variance of accidents to favor rather than hurt Larson at this track type. When you run up front as often as he is doing at these tracks, the odds are that things will eventually fall your way. So getting Larson at +1000 to finish at the Top Chevy is a bet I want to get now. The Speed Geeks Sim Center at Win the Race has fair value on Larson to finish at the Top Chevy at +879, and that’s with the sim being agnostic to favoring playoff drivers and, therefore, driving up the odds that Kyle Bush finishes as the Top Chevy.
I wouldn’t bet Larson all the way down to the +879 that the Sim Center says is fair, but at +1000, I’m willing to bet that if we run this race 100 times, Larson finishes at the Top Chevy at least 10 of them, making +1000 a value bet.
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