The meat and potatoes of the NASCAR Cup Series season, intermediate track racing, begins on Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. This season NASCAR will run 12 of 36 races using this package. Las Vegas is a 1.5-mile tri-oval track. The turns are progressively banked from 12-20 degrees. The front and back m stretch are banked at 9 degrees. Las Vegas was last repaved in 2007 and as the surface has aged the track has become a high wear surface.
Hendrick Motorsports has dominated Las Vegas in the Gen 7 era. Kyle Larson has two wins while William Byron and Alex Bowman each have a win as well. Kyle Larson also has three second place finishes. This is reflected in the Win The Race simulations where we have Kyle Larson as the clear favorite and HMS as a team projected to win 43% of our 200,000 simulations. While we show value on the HMS drivers and team, given the high temperatures on Sunday I expect there will be a lot of slipping and sliding, so I want to drop down to a market that is more forgiving than picking outright winners.
When most people think of AJ Allmendinger, road course, not intermediate track performance, is what comes to mind. That said, he has quietly put up solid numbers at the most comparable tracks to Las Vegas in the Gen 7 car. In five starts at Las Vegas in the Gen 7 AJ has two Top 10 finishes. That includes an eighth place here last spring. He also finished Top 10 last year at Charlotte, another 1.5-mile track, and Darlington, which is slightly shorter but has high tire wear and last year used the same engine/aero package as Las Vegas.
At Win The Race our 200,000 simulations have AJ finishing Top 10 30% of the time. That’s well clear of the 16.67% implied by +500. Which means that even if our simulations don’t account enough for the fall off we saw from AJ in the fall race here, we are still well clear of the implied odds of the bet. We also have to account for the fact that with its Truck Series team running RAM equipment, Kaulig may be getting less manufacturer support from Chevy. Still AJ had decent pace at COTA, so I’m not particularly worried about the equipment being incapable at this point. Still out of an abundance of caution I would be a bit more cautious on this bet than our simulations suggest and would bet this down to just +375.
