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.

Big day of NASCAR betting as stock car racing’s traveling road show heads south to Atlanta for the Kobalt Tools 500.  Atlanta is considered one of the fastest ‘non restrictor plate’ tracks on the circuit and we’ll try to get a position on the guy who ends up taking the checkered flag.  In three races we’ve had one winner and a good shot at victory late in both of the other two.  Last week Jeff Gordon was running up front all day but got passed late by Jimmie Johnson who won for the 2nd straight week.

KOBALT TOOLS 500–ATLANTA MOTOR SPEEDWAY

NASCAR’s Sprint Cup series makes their annual pilgrimage to Southern Nevada on Sunday for the Shelby American at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.  We had a good week with our NASCAR betting last week as we hit a winner on Jimmie Johnson at Fontana.  We’ll try to keep the winners coming this week in a notoriously tough track to handicap.

Since NASCAR starting running in Las Vegas back in 1998 there have been eight different winners (Mark Martin, Jeff Gordon, Jeff Burton, Jimmie Johnson, Matt Kenseth, Carl Edwards, Kyle Busch and Sterling Marlin) and three multiple winners (Burton and Kenseth twice, Johnson three times). Compounding the difficulty in handicapping the race, the track was completely reconfigured in 2006.  The most important change impacting Sprint Cup racing was adding more graduated banking in the corners to encourage side by side racing.

NASCAR heads to Fontana, California this week for the Auto Club 500.  We had a near miss with our play on Kevin Harvick in the Daytona 500 last weekend–he was leading the race late only to get shuffled back after a yellow flag with only a few laps remaining and would eventually finish 7th.  We’ll try to put one in the winner’s circle this weekend.

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll talk about some more advanced NASCAR handicapping concepts. What I typically like to do with ‘To Win’ wagers is identify a few drivers capable of winning and splitting up my wager in such a way that if either of them win we’ll turn a profit.  We’ll talk more about this down the road, but its pretty self explanatory.

NASCAR–AUTO CLUB 500: