Following two straight races at short, flat tracks, the NASCAR Cup Series heads to the 1.5-mile Texas Motor Speedway for Sunday's Autotrader EchoPark Automotive 400 (3:30 p.m. ET, FS1).
The Cup Series has run just one race at a fellow 1.5-mile track this season — Las Vegas at the beginning of March — so we don't have much data to analyze.
For this reason, I'm looking at similar 1.5-mile races dating back to 2022, which is noteworthy because that is when NASCAR introduced the current Next Gen car.
Further, Goodyear brought a new tire combination to Texas last fall and used it again at Las Vegas earlier this season, giving us another, yet smaller, dataset to examine to determine the smartest early bet for this weekend.
NASCAR Odds, Best Bet for Texas
*NASCAR odds as of Wednesday night
Looking at the 13 races at tracks similar to Texas — essentially all 1.5-mile tracks minus Atlanta (for obvious reasons) and Homestead (due to its extremely significant tire wear) — in the Next Gen era, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. has posted four top-1o finishes.
While it's not as simple as the following math, even though simple math is my brand, four top 10s in 13 attempts is a hit rate of 30.77%, which converts to odds of +225.
So, you can see why Stenhouse's current 20-1 top-10 odds caught my eye.
In addition, the driver of the No. 47 Chevrolet finished ninth at Texas in the fall, which was the first race that used the current tire combination at this track. He followed that up with a respectable 17th at Vegas.
Will Stenhouse score a top 10 on Sunday? Probably not.
But the data suggests his chances are more likely that what his current 20-1 odds imply.
The bet: Stenhouse Jr. (+2000) for a Top-10 Finish — bet365
