With back-to-back 1.5-mile races on the schedule, the success and failure of your betting strategy from Texas Motor Speedway is fresh.
This track type has been hard to handicap and prone to a lot of uncertainty. Seven of the top-10 finishers in the Autotrader EchoPark Automotive 500 also ran that well in the previous 1.5-miler at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Five of those drivers have at least a three-race streak. They are this week’s favorites.
The open question for the moment is whether this shows a shift in perspective. Are 1.5-milers becoming predictable again? Or, are they still prone to dark horse success? We won’t truly know until the Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Speedway is in the books. There are no current top-five streaks on this track type.
While seven drivers show current momentum, there was still room for a couple of longshots to run well. At Texas, Daniel Suarez scored his first “cookie-cutter” top-10 since leaving Stewart-Haas Racing. Christopher Bell earned his first top-five of the season and second of career on this track type.
Concentrate your wagers on favorites, but be prepared to pepper them with one or two dark horses.
[[ad:athena]]
Proposed Winner
At the risk of sounding hard-headed, we are doubling down on last week’s prediction. Texas and Kansas are not the same, but the skills necessary to go fast on similarly-configured, 1.5-mile tracks are close enough that we like to look at all of these courses when settling on a handicap.
Kyle Busch (+750) had an up and down performance in the EchoPark 500. His mood went through the same massive swings and he was never a serious contender for a top-five. But even on this bad day, Busch finished eighth, which was his 11th consecutive top-10 finish and only the second time since the start of last year’s playoffs that he was worse than sixth.
Busch won the spring Buschy McBusch 400 on this track, finished fifth last fall, and has a current three-race, top-five streak at Kansas during the playoffs. Dating back to the fall 2014 race on this track, he’s been outside the top 10 only four times in 13 races. Two of these were 10th-place results and one was an 11th. Larson seems unbeatable, but if Busch brings his “A” game, he’s one driver who can do it.
Best Bets for a top five
Yes, we know Larson (+235) is likely to win the Hollywood Casino 400, but after last week’s dominant performance, his line provides an even lower Return on Investment (ROI). There is also the compounding fact that he has no incentive to run well this week since he is locked into the Championship 4, which will be run on a track that is not at all similar to Kansas. The Hendrick Motorsports organization will put the lion’s share of their effort into Chase Elliott while Larson’s team starts to look ahead to the short, flat tracks of Martinsville Speedway and Phoenix Raceway.
Elliott (+850) started last week with a deficit. Caught coloring over the lines one more time, they were forced to charge from the back of the pack after failing pre-race inspection multiple times. The good news is that several other drivers also dropped to the back and minimized the damage. In Stage 1, Elliott looked like he was capable of challenging for a top-five. When he corded a tire in Stage 2, he never fully recovered and wound up seventh. That is his fifth consecutive result of seventh or better on 1.5-milers, so he should run well, but we’ve lost confidence in his ability to win on an oval.
Kevin Harvick (+1800) thrives on controversy and even though he has been knocked out of the playoffs, he is keeping his name front and center by trolling Elliott. The best way to stay relevant is to run up front and the best way to keep the No. 9 behind him is to finish in the top five. Oh yeah: Harvick also wants to win one of the final three races to keep from ending 2021 with a goose egg. Harvick enters the weekend with three straight Kansas top-fives. We ranked him sixth last week and he finished fifth. We think he will be a little stronger at Kansas – a track on which he finished second this spring.
Drivers have to lose races in order to figure out how to win them. Last week, Tyler Reddick (+3000) was one of only a few drivers who could run with Larson. It was going to take a miracle to beat him and as Reddick pushed the envelope to the max, he stepped over the line ever so slightly and fell back through the field. His fifth consecutive top-10 finish on a 1.5-mile track was the result, but one needs to recall that he finished second this spring at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Best Bets for a top 10
A rising tide elevates all the ships in the harbor. William Byron (+1100) challenged Larson at the end of the EchoPark 500 before finishing second. That was his third top-five on this course type and sixth top-10 in eight races. It could have been better. If Byron was not fixated on being a good teammate and not spoiling Larson’s finish, he might have taken the lead on one of the restarts and secured track position. With Larson locked in, that is one less thing to worry about in Kansas.
Ryan Blaney (+1100) has been the most consistent Team Penske driver during the playoffs. Last week’s sixth at Texas was the fifth time this year he finished that well or better on 1.5-mile tracks. After Denny Hamlin suffered crash damage late in the going, it allowed Blaney to take over second-place in the points – and if he can stay there, he advances to Phoenix in championship contention no matter what else happens. The odds of him doing so are high; his odds of winning the race are less so.
We did not give Brad Keselowski (+1600) very much respect last week and he outperformed our expectations by a wide margin. With the exception of a second-place finish in the Talladega Superspeedway lottery, that was his first genuinely strong run, however, and his first top-five on an unrestricted oval since New Hampshire Motor Speedway. If something had happened to Larson, Kez had a car capable of winning in Texas. And that is what it will take for him to advance to the Championship 4 since Kez had only eight playoff bonus points entering the current round. Keselowski has top-fives in his last three Kansas starts.
Martin Truex Jr. (+1000) is now in a must-win situation after his accident in Texas. His incident with Suarez opens a discussion of how the complexion of the playoffs is changing. Drivers further down the order feel the same kind of pressure to perform weekends when top-10 are actually a possibility and Suarez’s refusal to simply give up a position in the top 10 increases the difficulty faced by the contenders. Truex should have been a lock for a top-10 on the 1.5-miler since he’s finished worse than 12th there in the past two seasons only three times when he ran into trouble.
Given the speed of his three Hendrick Motorsports teammates last week in Texas, we suspect Alex Bowman (+3300) would have been fast if not for his involvement in an early multi-car accident triggered when Bubba Wallace got loose on a restart. The downside to starting him is that is not his first misfortune on a 1.5-mile track this year, but when he’s stayed out of trouble, he has three top-fives to his credit with a best of third in Atlanta 1.
PointsBet Sportsbook is our Official Sports Betting Partner, and we may receive compensation if you place a bet on PointsBet for the first time after clicking our links.
Cookie Cutter finishes – 2017+ Through Texas | ||||||
Driver | Wins | Top-3s | Top-5s | Top-10s | Top-15s | Starts |
Martin Truex, Jr. | 10 | 24 | 30 | 43 | 45 | 51 |
7 | 16 | 27 | 40 | 44 | 51 | |
6 | 19 | 27 | 37 | 41 | 51 | |
5 | 13 | 19 | 34 | 40 | 51 | |
5 | 9 | 20 | 27 | 37 | 51 | |
4 | 10 | 14 | 31 | 37 | 51 | |
3 | 5 | 9 | 30 | 32 | 51 | |
2 | 13 | 18 | 27 | 32 | 41 | |
2 | 11 | 18 | 27 | 39 | 51 | |
2 | 2 | 3 | 11 | 31 | 51 | |
1 | 7 | 17 | 28 | 36 | 51 | |
1 | 4 | 9 | 17 | 23 | 40 | |
1 | 1 | 3 | 14 | 17 | 40 | |
1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 19 | |
14 drivers | ||||||
| 3 | 8 | 22 | 27 | 51 | |
| 3 | 4 | 6 | 13 | 51 | |
| 2 | 3 | 10 | 13 | 19 | |
| 2 | 2 | 7 | 20 | 51 | |
Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. |
| 1 | 3 | 5 | 25 | 51 |
| 1 | 2 | 16 | 26 | 49 | |
| 1 | 1 | 7 | 7 | 18 | |
22 drivers | ||||||
Best in top five |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| ||||||
|
|
| 10 | 16 | 51 | |
|
|
| 7 | 18 | 50 | |
|
|
| 2 | 7 | 41 | |
|
|
| 1 | 7 | 51 | |
| ||||||
|
|
|
| 2 | 31 | |
|
|
|
| 2 | 29 | |
|
|
|
| 2 | 7 | |
|
|
|
| 1 | 47 | |
| ||||||
|
|
|
|
| 33 | |
|
|
|
|
| 31 | |
|
|
|
|
| 25 | |
|
|
|
|
| 23 | |
|
|
|
|
| 20 | |
|
|
|
|
| 19 | |
|
|
|
|
| 12 | |
|
|
|
|
| 7 | |
|
|
|
|
| 7 | |
|
|
|
|
| 4 | |
|
|
|
|
| 2 | |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Driver | Wins | Top-3s | Top-5s | Top-10s | Top-15s | Starts |
1 | 1 | 5 | 11 | 22 | 44 | |
| 2 | 5 | 12 | 30 | 44 | |
|
|
| 1 | 5 | 44 | |
|
|
|
| 2 | 33 | |
JH Nemechek |
|
|
|
| 1 | 13 |
|
|
|
|
| 31 | |
|
|
|
|
| 24 |
Best Bets for the EchoPark 500 (Texas 2)
South Point 400 (Las Vegas 2)
Quaker State 400 (Atlanta 2)
