The NASCAR Cup Series is in Sin City for 400 miles of intermediate track racing.
Sunday's Pennzoil 400 (3:30 p.m. ET, FOX) takes place at the 1.5-mile Las Vegas Motor Speedway oval.
Las Vegas is steadily moving from a moderate to high tire wear track. While the tire wear isn't on the level of Auto Club Speedway, it's still quite substantial.
Last fall in the Vegas playoff race, the fastest car fell off nearly 7 mph over the long run. In yesterday's XFINITY Series race, the leaders fell off between 5 and 5 mph over the long run.
That's important to note because Cup Series drivers had just 20 minutes to tune their cars in during yesterday's practice session, so very few made a long run.
This is why I believe that books are overreacting to raw practice numbers rather than trends, especially when it comes to one manufacturer.
NASCAR Picks, Predictions for Las Vegas
William Byron was the fastest driver over both five- and 10-lap averages in practice. The falloff between those two averages was 0.106 seconds for the driver of the No. 24 Hendrick Chevrolet.
Similar is true for his teammate, Kyle Larson, who experienced a 0.159-second average time drop while placing second in both five- and 10-lap average.
The Team Penske teammates of Ryan Blaney and Joey Logano each had a drop off of more than 0.2 seconds between the averages.
Fellow Ford driver Kevin Harvick experienced a 0.17 second drop off.
Aric Almirola was the only Ford driver to have a fall off of less than 0.15 seconds.
Meanwhile, the Toyota drivers looked like they were trending in the right direction over the long run.
Christopher Bell's drop off was 0.051 seconds between the two metrics, while rookie Ty Gibbs experienced a 0.074 second differential.
Even Denny Hamlin's fall off, while over the 0.1 second mark, was just 0.126 seconds, which was better than every Ford but Almirola and every Chevy except Byron and Ross Chastain.
Yes, Martin Truex, Jr. had more fall off. Bubba Wallace only made a five-lap run and Tyler Reddick missed practice altogether with an engine change.
But we've seen this before from the Toyotas.
They may not have the fastest short run cars, but like last year at both Las Vegas and Kansas races — Vegas' most similar track — the Toyotas come to life over the long run relative to their competitors.
Extrapolating that over an even longer run, we can see the Toyotas may have a significant advantage, that's why I'm taking Toyota +360 to be the winning manufacturer of today's race.
My model gives Toyota a 28.9% chance to win, which equates to +245 as fair value.
That means FanDuel's +360 offering is quite a bit of value.
I've got one unit on this bet, and would bet it down to +300 to leave us some wiggle room for my model to be a little too high.
The Bet: Toyota Winning Manufacturer +360 | Bet to: +300
