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Thanks to a rainy weekend we’ve got a doubleheader of NASCAR races on Monday from Texas Motor Speedway.  The Sprint Cup race we’ll go first, starting at 12 noon Eastern/9 AM Pacific.  Today’s forecast calls for cool temperatures and cloudy skies, but no rain is expected meaning that the race will most likely take place as scheduled.

Texas is a tough track to handicap, at least based on past performance, since the management has changed its configuration twice.  Throw in the changes brought about by NASCAR’s so called ‘Car of Tomorrow’ and the conditions of the track and the racing that occurs on it have changed several times.  Despite that, the drivers that have done well before the track configuration changes have done well since and a lot of what horse racing enthusiasts would call ‘track bias’ still looks to be valid.

NASCAR–SAMSUNG MOBILE 500 AT TEXAS MOTOR SPEEDWAY:

When handicapping NASCAR, we first try to come up with a list of ‘likely’ winners.   This is based on track bias factors, drivers’ previous performance at the track, recent form, starting position, and a few other statistical factors.  Once we’ve come up with our list we start to narrow it down further using more rigorous statistical analysis from the season to date and the specific track.  This gives us a shorter list, and at this point we start to put together a betting ticket.

There have been 18 Sprint Cup races run at Texas since 1997.  Starting in 2005, NASCAR has run twice per season at Texas.  Curiously, there have only been two drivers who’ve won more than once here–Carl Edwards and Jeff Burton.  14 of the 18 winners have started from the 8th position or better.  On some tracks, you’ll see that a bias toward drivers with good starting slots changes over time–for example, on older tracks you’ll see that its not as strong over the past ten years as back in the day with giants like Richard Petty, Junior Johnson and David Pearson terrorized the ‘old school’.  At Texas, however, its held up pretty well with only 1 of the last 8 and 2 of the last 10 winners starting further back than 8th.   So we’ll take the top 8 drivers and look for those who’ve performed well on this track–these prices are from BoDog and BetUS but as always shop them around.

TO WIN:

45% of wager on Tony Stewart +700
35% of wager on Kyle Busch +700
20% of wager on Clint Bowyer +1600

MATCHUPS:

Our matchup formula is pretty simple–we look at a variety of factors and determine which of the pair has performed better on the given track.  We then look for better performing drivers at good prices.  Here’s a couple:

Kyle Busch -105 over Kurt Busch
Matt Kenseth -110 over Mark Martin

Kenseth has only one once here, but has the best average finish of any driver.  He’s finished in the top 9 in 8 of the last 9 races here.