The Tennis Database presents the Daytona Road Course

The turtles have been depolyed and there will be right turns.

Both road course races that took place in 2020 happened after I stopped capping Nascar and reverted back to tennis, so this will be a first for me.

Here’s some data:

It looks like there are two distinct types of non-ovals in Nacsar - a ‘roval’, which is essentially a race on half of an oval track and half of it turned thru the infield and then actual flat road courses. So, first go and all, I weighted the histories at the Daytona and Charlotte Rovals a little more than performace at Watkins Glen or Sonoma (as far as I can tell CotA and Road America are new this year).

I accumulated the top ten finishes for all four courses and then broke it out by track. There are some obvious things that stick out immediately. Shockingly, the superstars who win all the ovals… are also really good on road courses. That sucks.

I did the same process with the crew chiefs. I’ll spare you all the screen shots but, the data here pretty much aligns with the drivers. The two guys who look like they might really benefit from their crew chiefs today are Austin Dillon and Bubba Wallace, so keep an eye on that.

Again, I performed the same data with laps led. I mentioned last year that my unfamiliarity with Nascar meant I went looking for some indicators of top performance that didn’t necessarily correlate to finishes (as last week should teach anyone). Anyway, laps led shines a real light on a small handful of drivers, most notably Chase Elliott, Martin Truex and Brad Keselowski.

I have found I care very little for the starting order at most oval tracks. It would seem that where you start does have some bearing on how you finish at a road course though, so I have factored today’s lineup into my odds.

Here are the pit stall assignments as reported by Nascar and @bobpockrass (who is a must follow on Twitter). I factor this into my odds as well.

I weight all that above info, plus two more metrics that I won’t present here, and throw it all together in a steaming pot of hot air and I get this:

I currently have 13 outs but only about 3 or 4 get outright odds up by mid-week so I have compared my odds to theirs to see if there are any bettable outrights. I have included Draftkings, even though I can’t bet there, because it seems almost everyone I talk to about Nascar betting has access to them.

I thought I was seeing things when my model, such as it is, spit out Chase Elliott at 3/1. However, once I started checking books, I realized my number was somehow… high. This is like a Djokovic at a Slam or a Nadal at Roland Garros kind of outright number. In his defense, Elliott has won, wait for it, the last FOUR road courses run in Nascar. If you go back to mid-2018 he’s won five of the last seven road courses races. That’s… absurd.

It took BetOnline until… this morning to post head-to-heads so, I won’t have time to post graphics about all of them.

Head-to-heads that were super close that I chickened out on include Harvick > AJ, Kurt > Byron, Larson > Bowman, and Logano > Byron.

Good luck