This weekend all three NASCAR national touring series will head to Atlanta. EchoPark Speedway is a 1.54-mile quad-oval track featuring high banking of about 28 degrees in the turns and 5 degrees on the straights. The configuration promotes high speeds and tight pack racing. The track’s steeper banking and narrower racing surface make it race more like a superspeedway than a traditional intermediate oval. However, as the track has aged since the repave before the 2022 season, it has become a distinct type of racing. The track is now somewhere between the racing on intermediate tracks and that found at Daytona and Talladega.
Over the past two years, Atlanta has produced some of the most exciting racing in the NASCAR Cup Series. In 2024 the first race at Atlanta was decided in a three-wide photo finish. The margin of victory in that race was .003 seconds. Last summer over a quarter of the field was taken out by wrecks. The racing that resulted shifted away from the two or three line drafting that has dominated in recent years. Instead the race looked more like drafting from previous generations.
Team Penske has won two of the six races at Atlanta over the past three seasons. In addition, to the wins, the team has two more Top 3 finishes and another two Top 5 finishes in that time. Simply put, Team Penske runs up front here. The finishes are not flukes either as the Penske drivers have dominated the laps led category. Joey Logano has led over 50 laps three times. Drivers from Team Penske have led laps in all six races in that time. In fact, in five of six races all three drivers led at least one lap.
Backing up historical performance at Atlanta, Team Penske was again strong on Sunday. Joey Logano was in contention on the last lap. Ryan Blaney had a strong car, but made what was ultimately the wrong decision about when to pit and got shuffled back. Austin Cindrc started at the back and worked his way forward and led laps. Ultimately Cindric was in a wreck and relegated to a poor finish. However, all three drivers had cars and performances that made them a threat in the Daytona 500.
At Win The Race our 100,000 simulations of Sunday’s race are very high on Team Penske. We have Ryan Blaney as the favorite, winning over 11% of our simulations. Joey Logano is the second most likely driver to win, winning 9.6% of the simulations. Finally, Austin Cindric is the fourth most likely driver to win per our simulations, winning 8.1% of the time. This gives the Team Penske drivers a combined win rate of 29.3% or fair value of around +240.
This gives us plenty of room for us to be higher than we should be on Team Penske and still have an edge when compared to the +340 (22.73% implied) odds being offered at DraftKings. I want to keep both a protection against the simulation being too high on Penske and a reasonable edge, so I would bet this down to +300.
