Cold rainy weather awaits NASCAR as all three national series head to Watkins Glen International this weekend. The short course configuration used by NASCAR in 2.45 miles long and features 11 turns. Banking in the truns ranges between 6 and 10 degrees. The track also has a 2,150-foot frontstretch, a 2,400-foot backstretch, and a total elevation change of 115 feet. The Inner Loop chicane, added in 1992 to improve safety, creates a dramatic braking zone on the back straight and serves as one of the circuit’s premier overtaking opportunities.
This will be just the second road course race utilizing the new low downforce/high horsepower package that made its debut at COTA several months ago. However, the results at COTA suggest that historical data should still give us strong predictive value. The drivers we expected to run up front at road courses/COTA in particular did so. Tyler Reddick won the race, Shane Van Gisbergen finished second, and Christopher Bell finished third. Consistent road course performers Ty Gibbs, Michael McDowell, Kyle Larson, Chase Elliott, and AJ Allmendinger also had Top 10 finishes. So while the potential rain may add some chaos to the race this weekend, ultimately I’m comfortable relying our the historical data for this weeks simulations/projections.
Watkins Glen has been Tyler Reddick’s worst road course over the past several years. Worst is of course a relative term. Excluding his incident marred 2024 race, he has an average finish of 8.0 at Watkins Glen in the Gen 7 era. He has been fairly consistent with finishes of 7, 8, and 9. However, that’s three spots below his average finish of 5.0 in his 15 other incident free road/street course races.
Christopher Bell hasn’t lost a head to head matchup to Tyler Reddick at Watkins Glen since 2022 and that year he finished eighth to Reddick’s seventh. Since 2022 he has finished in the Top 3 twice. In 2024, despite Toyota’s down year and being involved in two incidents not of his own making, the first on lap one and the second on lap 62, he still managed to bring the 20 car home to a fourteenth place finish.
Given Bell’s relative strength here to Reddick, I think he should be the favorite in this matchup. But even if we conclude that the sample size of races at Watkins Glen is too small to determine that Reddick is weaker than Bell here, the overall performance of the two drivers on road courses means this should at worse be a toss up. In 19 incident free races for both drivers at road/street courses the head to head record favors Bell 11-9. Our 200,000 simulations at Win The Race agree with my intuition, and have Bell as a slight favorite to Reddick in this matchup. As such, I’m happy to take Bell at the +120 being offered by Bet365 and would bet this down to even money.
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