Alex Bowman is really good good at Dover. Since joining Hendrick Motorsports he has finishes of 23, 28, 2, 3, 25, 5, 1, and 5. While it’s “only” an eight race sample size, it’s good for a 62.5% Top 5 rate and 37.5% Top 3 rate.
Bowman has had a very mixed start to 2024. At Las Vegas, another track that he has historically been very strong at, he finished 18th and had mid teens speed all day. That said he finished 4th at Bristol and COTA, two other tracks where he has been successful in the past. So given his history here, I’m betting this is the place to get Bowman back on track.
I’m going to ladder Bowman’s Top 10, 5, and outright odds to get exposure to both his constancy and his upside.
This number is out of line with where other books have Bowman. Bowman’s outright odds range from +1600 to +1800 at every other book I’ve seen. But Superbook continues to have Bowman hanging out at +2500. He hasn’t had race winning speed yet this year, so I understand some skepticism. That said, Bowman’s upside here when his teammates have had great speed at the intermediate tracks simply cannot be overlooked. I’m not betting on Bowman to win down at +1800, but at 25-1 I’m in.
This is as low at +200 at DraftKings and ESPN Bet. I’m not interested at that price, but I’ll go down to +250 on this bet. Bowman missed this race last year after an injury at Talladega but looking at Front Runners from Win The Race, we can see that in 2022 he completed 33% of his laps in the Top 5. If we run that back even further we see that in 2020 and 2021 he completed just under 30% of his laps inside the Top 5.
All of Bowman’s Top 10 finishes have also been Top 5, but I am still building in a little cushion here. Bowman completed 82.25% of his laps at Dover in the Top 10 in 2022. Looking back to 2020 and 2021 he completed around 53% of his laps inside the Top 10, which includes a very bad first race in 2020 where he only ran 6 laps inside the Top 10 due to early damage. When he doesn’t get damaged he is very consistent here. I wouldn’t play this down to the -160 where it sits at some books, but -120 is an acceptable lower limit for this bet.
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