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The racing at Atlanta Motor Speedway this weekend hasn’t been great. Its been nearly impossible to pass the leader. The end of the Xfinity race was also crazy with what seemed like half the field running out of gas. Despite this, we did learn one really important thing from Saturday’s races. Atlanta is still a drafting track. Atlanta is aging some and developing its own flavor of racing, but its still obvious that cars drafting are significantly faster than cars on their own. So while we may see a lot of single file racing in the Ambetter 400, when its time for drivers to make moves they will still likely be in the draft. This means that the potential for large wrecks and chaos remains high.
At drafting tracks one of my favorite spots to find value is in the head to head market. My target is matchups with two drivers in similar equipment with similar skill. In those cases, if we are getting plus money on one of the drivers I’ll take that side. In doing so I’m confident in coming out ahead in the long run given the variance of these races. This weekend Caesars is offering us just such a matchup.
Two years ago the equipment gap between Trackhouse and RFK was significant. Even for most of last season there was a reasonable equipment advantage for Trackhouse over RFK. That said, RFK has made significant strides over the past two seasons and is now bringing very good cars to the track week in and week out. This is particularly true at drafting tracks. Last year, in the races he didn’t wreck, Chris Buescher finished 4th, 3rd, 15th, 1st, and 19th, at the drafting tracks. Buescher also led laps in five of the six races, including leading 39 laps in the second race here at Atlanta.
To be fair, Ross Chastain is no slouch at drafting. He won at Talladega two years ago. At the Daytona 500 last week, he had a chance to win the race late. That said, overall the stats of the past year favor Buescher here. Last year Buescher was 5-1 against Ross at Daytona, Atlanta, and Talladega, with the one loss being the first Atlanta race where Buescher wrecked. A one year sample size of head to head results at high variance tracks isn’t the strongest basis to make a bet. It does show however that Chastain being favored is probably wrong.
The Speed Geeks Sim Center at Win The Race has Buescher favored in this matchup based on 10,000 simulations of the race. The Sim Center rates this as one of the best bets of the 842 bets we currently track.
Even adding in a margin of error on the simulations, +120 for Buescher is a generous price against a similarly situated driver. I have one unit on this to win 1.2. I would take this down to +110.
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