The NASCAR Cup Series heads to Martinsville Speedway on Sunday. Martinsville is a true oval track with just 12 degrees of banking in the turns and flat straight aways. At just .526 miles in length Martinsville is the shortest track on the NASCAR Cup Series Championship points paying schedule. The track is also unique in its surface. The turns are concrete while the straight aways are asphalt.
Sunday will be the second race of the year on a short flat track. Though given the unique size, shape, and surface of Martinsville, the data we have from Phoenix several weeks ago provides only minimal value. Ultimately the best predictor of future success at Martinsville is a drivers historical success. There are some drivers, like Ryan Blaney who just get this track and have great success here. So this week’s best bet is looking to target a group of drivers who have had great success at the track.
Over the past three seasons four drivers have won at Martinsville. Ryan Blaney (12 car) and William Byron (24 car) each have two wins. Denny Hamlin (11 car) and Kyle Larson (5 car) have the two other wins. Ryan Blaney and Kyle Larson each have a second place finish over this time span, as does Chase Elliott (9 car).
Denny Hamlin and Kyle Larson lead all drivers in average running position at the track over the past three years. Despite having to start in the thirties three times during this period Ryan Blaney is fifth in average running position among active drivers, behind Chase Elliott in fourth. Additionally, Blaney, Elliott, Hamlin, and Larson, are the top four drivers in True Performance and incident adjusted speed (proprietary metrics from Win The Race) over the past three years.
Simply put, in these four cars all under 16.5, we have the four most dominate drivers at Martinsville over the past three years. As such its no surprise that they are the top four drivers in the Win The Race simulations. At Win The Race we have these four drivers alone winning in an astonishing 68.2% of the 200,000 simulations. That translates to a fair market price of -214.
At Caesars and Bet365 the odds offered on the Under 16.5 group, which adds in quite a few other drivers who have had success at Martinsville (critically adding Ross Chastain and Brad Keselsowski) we are getting odds of just -130. The implied odds of -130 mean that we would need to win this bet just 56.52% of the time to break even. That means that even if our simulation is too high on our favorites we have a ton of room to be wrong and still have value on this bet. While I wouldn’t bet it all the way to -214, I do think there is value on this number down to -175.
