This weekend the NASCAR Cup Series will make its final trip of 2025 to an intermediate track. This year the Homestead-Miami race was moved to early in the season. So Las Vegas is now the lone intermediate track in the Round of 8.
Las Vegas is a 1.5-mile tri-oval track. The track features 20 degrees of banking in the turns. The front and back stretch are both banked at 9 degrees. Often considered a sister track to Kansas, Las Vegas is a multi-grove moderate-high tire wear venue.
When handicapping Las Vegas the primary comps are the other 1.5-mile “cookie cutter” tracks of Kansas Speedway and Charlotte Motor Speedway. Homestead-Miami Speedway and Darlington Raceway also provide very useful data to predict Las Vegas. Personally I don’t use Texas Motor Speedway because of the chaos that has tended to show up at that track since it was reconfigured.
Two weeks ago at Kansas I was all in on Alex Bowman. Unfortunately, despite having decent speed, he never found track position in that race. Then with around 40 laps to go, Bowman was put into the wall when Shane Van Gisbergen lost control racing around William Byron. That ended Bowman’s day.
That said, one bad day doesn’t change my opinion about Bowman being likely to come out strong at this type of track. Bowman has been outstanding at Las Vegas in the Gen 7 car. He has finished inside the Top 10 in four of his six starts here. That includes a seventh place finish here in the spring. Only once has he failed to log over 50% of his laps inside the Top 10.
Last week at Kansas, despite not logging a ton of laps inside the Top 10, Bowman still had above average speed. Indeed, looking at all races run using the intermediate package in 2025, Bowman has logged above average speed in 12 of 16 races. I’m betting that he bounces back strong this week and returns to running inside the Top 10 most of the day at Las Vegas.
At Win The Race our simulations have Bowman finishing Top 10 in just around 50% of our 20,000 simulations. So at +150 we are getting a ton of value on a driver who has consistently performed at this track. I would be comfortable betting this all the way down to +110.
