The longest race of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season will be held on Sunday night at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Kyle Larson will be attempting the “double,” running both the Indy 500 and Coke 600. But race fans get even more with the “triple” that starts with the F1 Monaco Grand Prix Sunday.
Charlotte is a 1.5-mile quad-oval “cookie-cutter” intermediate track. The most similar tracks to Charlotte are Texas Motor Speedway, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Kansas Speedway, and Homestead-Miami Speedway. All feature similar overall lengths of 1.5 miles and comparable high-speed configurations. These tracks have banking ranging from 20 to 24 degrees in the corners, mirroring Charlotte’s 24-degree turn banking. Additionally, the quad-oval shape of Charlotte mirrors Texas, and is similar to Kansas and Las Vegas, both of which use near-identical D-shaped layouts that emphasize aerodynamic balance and throttle control. Finally, as a high-speed, high-banked intermediate track, performance at Darlington Raceway is also a factor when handicapping Charlotte.
The biggest wild card with handicapping this race is the length. At 600 miles, the Coke 600 is 200 miles longer than any other race on an intermediate track. Stage racing has reduced the endurance aspect of the race somewhat. The race is now broken up into four 100-lap stages (the only race of the year to have four, rather than three stages). However, drivers and cars must still survive the full 600 miles. The race typically lasts over four hours, starting in the evening at 6 pm and running into the night under the lights.
With the exception of Kansas, where 23XI just seemed off, Bubba Wallace has had plenty of speed to start 2025. Unfortunately, he hasn’t necessarily had the finishes to correspond with that speed. At Las Vegas, he led 20 laps and was fourth in both stages. He got caught up in a late race wreck and finished 28th, though. He went on to lead 56 laps at Homestead, placing fifth in stage 2 and did manage third for the race. At Darlington Bubba finished second in Stage 1, before incidents, including a late race collision with Kyle Larson, ultimately doomed him to a 21st place finish. At Texas Bubba again had good speed, he was 10th in Win The Race’s incident adjusted speed metric. Unfortunately despite finishing sixth in stage 2 he ended up finishing the race in 33rd after running into a rapidly breaking Kyle Larson.
Bubba’s last two runs at Charlotte are also quite promising. In 2023 he started seventh and finished fourth. Bubba did struggle with speed early in that race. He ultimately had speed on par with Kyle Larson and Tyler Reddick for the last 100 laps of the race. Last in Bubba finished 11th in the rain shortened race. Bubba was sixth in stage 1 and had top five speed most of the race.
Given Bubba’s speed this year and recent history at Charlotte, I think books are underselling his potential this weekend. This is particularly true in the Top Toyota market, where books are favoring Denny Hamlin and Christopher Bell. Historically, Bell and Hamlin should be the favorites. In 2025, though, despite Denny having a win at Darlington and Bell having a pair of Top 3 finishes at Darlington and Kansas, they have been slower than expected.
This year at the 1+ mile intermediate tracks, Bubba has the second-best incident-adjusted speed among Toyota drivers (6th best in the series) at 0.92mph over the median race speed. Bell and Hamlin are 3rd (0.33mph over average) and 4th (.056mph over average) among Toyota and 14th and 13th overall, respectively.
At Win The Race, we run 20,000 race simulations based on predictive analytics. We have Bubba as the fourth most likely Toyota driver to finish as the Top Toyota. We have Bubba finishing as the Top Toyota in 14.39% of simulations. That’s well clear of the 7.69% implied by +1200. I’ve got half a unit on Bubba to finish as the Top Toyota on Sunday night. I would comfortably bet this down to +800.
