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Nature is healing. All three NASCAR National Series are at the same track this weekend for the first time since before the Olympic break. The Xfinity regular season and Cup Series first playoff round will end at Bristol this weekend, while the Truck Series will run the second race of the playoffs on Thursday night.
Bristol has no true comparable tracks. At .533 miles in length, the track is almost the same length as Martinsville. That is where the similarities end, though. Martinsville is a flat track, with just 12 degrees of banking in its turns. The turns at Bristol are progressively banked at 24-28 degrees. Martinsville has concrete and asphalt sections, while Bristol is entirely concrete. Dover is a concrete track with 24-degree banking in the turns. However, at 1 mile in length, the track is nearly twice the size of Bristol. Simply put, Bristol is unique.
Given the unique nature of Bristol when handicapping races here, the focus is almost exclusively on a driver’s previous performance at Bristol. The Cup Series only ran on the concrete surface once a year in 2022 and 2023. So, this means we have fairly limited data to use. Further complicating things is that this spring, there was unreal tire falloff despite the fact the tires were ostensibly the same as those used in the 2022 and 2023 races. So, I plan on treading lightly before practice and qualifying on Friday. I do, however, have one bet that I want to lock in now, given the driver’s history at this track.
Since joining Hendrick Motorsports in 2018 Alex Bowman has finished inside the Top 10 at Bristol in four of his 10 starts. This includes a fourth place finish here in the spring race. If we just assumed that he would continue to finish Top 10 here in 40% of his races the fair odds on him to finish Top 10 would be +150.
There is good reason beyond using a “dumb” metric like previous Top 10 finish rate to think that +150 is not an unreasonable fair market number for Bowman this weekend. First, in the spring race, while he only ran 23.8% of his laps inside the Top 10, he did have the 11th best average running position. His average running position is all the more impressive, considering that he had a poor qualifying effort and started 29th.
If we take out John H. Nemechek and Josh Berry, who each only have one start at Bristol in the Gen 7 car, Bowman’s average running position is 9th best in the Cup Series over the three races at Bristol in the Gen 7 car. In those three races, Bowman also ran 38.32% of his laps in the Top 10. That Top 10 rate is just under that 40% Top 10 finish rate across his starts here with Hendrick Motorsports.
In addition to his Bristol performance, Bowman has been strong at Dover over the past few years. While as mentioned in the introduction, Dover is nearly twice the length of Bristol. However, the track is still the most similar one that the Cup Series runs on. This spring Bowman finished eighth at Dover. Over his last seven races at that track he has six Top 10 finishes, including a win.
The icing on the cake for this bet is the Speed Geeks Sim Center from Win the Race. The Sim Center runs 10,000 simulations of the race to project fair market value for bets. The Sim Center has fair value for Bowman to finish in the Top 10 at +163 or 37.9% implied probability. That makes this one of, if not the best, bet on the board at this time.
Given all the data and the Sim Center’s confirmation of the value on Bowman’s Top 10 odds, this is one bet I want to lock in now. I wouldn’t go all the way down to the fair value number of +163. I would however be comfortable making this bet down to +185.
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