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In American motorsports, perhaps more than any other sport, anything can happen on any given race day. This means that there are opportunities that simply don’t exist in other sports on a weekly basis. If you are not familiar with motorsports betting, check out my NASCAR betting overview at Win The Race before continuing.
The anything can happen nature of motorsports is never more true than on weeks when NASCAR visits a superspeedway. Daytona, Talladega, and since 2022, to a lesser extent Atlanta, are tracks that focus on pack drafting. The tracks are long tracks, with high banking. These conditions produce extreme speed. They also require drivers to push and draft off the car in front of them to stay with the pack. This means that single car incidents quickly turn into huge wrecks. Given the propensity for “the big one” to take out a large number of cars, its not uncommon for 50% of the field to to DNF at these tracks.
The high DNF rate can lead to wild swings in betting outcomes (and DFS too). Its possible to go into the final lap of a race looking like you will have a very profitable day and then to have a wreck turn every bet into a loser. Although this is also possible on an intermediate, short track, or road course, the frequency with which it happens at a superspeedway is significantly higher. So, what does this mean for betting?
Particularly this year when we have back to back drafting tracks to start the year it is critical to ensure you don’t drain your bankroll before we get to the first intermediate track of the year at Las Vegas. Understand that its entirely possible to lose every bet you make at Daytona and Atlanta. I would never recommend having your entire bankroll on a single race. At these races its even more important to manage your risk. Understand that if you place a lot of bets on these races you could very well head into Las Vegas in a large hole. Its not unreasonable to reduce your bet size and overall volume for these races if you are not comfortable with the level of risk involved.
Its always important to make plus expected value bets. At superspeedways however I normally want to have a larger edge than at other tracks. Given the volatility of these races its obviously harder to predict the results. The accuracy of models at superspeedways is far less than at other tracks. As such I want to have a bigger margin of error when betting. O
ne particular place where this comes into play is in group bets and head to head bets. I will almost never make a bet that is less than even money for a head to head. For group bets I would avoid odds of less than +300 for a four driver group. The simple fact is that given the higher than average probability of a DNF these bets can often become coin flips. As such I want longer odds on these bets than I might otherwise need at a track like Phoenix where outcomes are highly predictable.
