Following a short track race at Martinsville, a dirt race at Bristol and a superspeedway race at Talladega, the NASCAR Cup Series heads to the 1-mile, highly-banked concrete oval of Dover Motor Speedway this Sunday.
Dover is a very unique track in its own right, which is compounded even further considering NASCAR's Next Gen car has yet to race on anything like it to this point.
With this in mind, I'm waiting until Saturday's practice and qualifying sessions before building out a deeper betting card. However, there is one 40-1 longshot that's worth betting right now in case he unloads with speed this weekend and odds shorten ahead of Sunday's DuraMAX Drydene 400 (3 p.m. ET, FS1).
NASCAR Pick for Dover
*Odds as of Wednesday morning
Ross Chastain has already banked two wins (Circuit of the Americas and Talladega) for Trackhouse Racing, and the numbers suggest this weekend's race at Dover could be Daniel Suarez's turn.
I can make a very good argument that Dover has been Suarez's best track across the NASCAR Truck, XFINITY and Cup Series when driving good equipment, defined as Kyle Busch Motorsports in Trucks, Joe Gibbs Racing (JGR) in XFINITY and JGR, Stewart-Haas Racing and Trackhouse in Cup.
Here's a quick rundown Suarez's finishes at Dover while driving for those teams:
- NASCAR Truck Series: 2nd, 2nd
- NASCAR XFINITY Series: 19th, 10th, 9th, 1st, 3rd, 7th
- NASCAR Cup Series: 6th, 8th, 3rd, 10th, 11th, 14th, 9th
In case you're a lazy reader like myself, let me summarize this for you.
In 15 career starts at Dover in good equipment through NASCAR's top three series, Suarez has one win, five top-three finishes, 13 top 11s and worst result of 19th.
And I think we can all agree that Trackhouse's equipment this year is surprisingly fast, so we shouldn't be surprised if Suarez unloads with plenty of speed at this best NASCAR track this weekend.
At 40-1 odds, I see very little downside to betting Suarez right now as this price offers a very high ceiling if he is fast, while also not putting much of a dent in our bankrolls before filling out our betting cards over the weekend.
