Back to Bristol for NASCAR Wagering

Saturday’s Sharpie 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway is one of the most hotly anticipated NASCAR races of the Sprint Cup season. It’s also one of the most popular events in NASCAR betting. Tickets are notoriously hard to come by; even the Nationwide Series events at Bristol regularly draw 100,000 spectators. The rest of us will have to watch ESPN at 8:00 p.m. Eastern (pre-race show at 7:00).

This half-mile cauldron of a track, aka Thunder Valley, is at the other end of the spectrum from the superspeedways at Daytona and Talladega. It’s a tight squeeze to get 43 Cars of Tomorrow on the course at the same time. Swapping paint isn’t just inevitable – it’s part of the strategy.

As usual, the Toyotas of the Joe Gibbs Racing team are featured in the top echelon of the NASCAR odds. Kyle Busch is the favorite to win the Sharpie 500 at +500. Teammates Tony Stewart and Denny Hamlin are close behind at +800. However, the Roush Fenway Racing team has enjoyed solid results of late. Carl Edwards drove his Ford Fusion to victory at last week’s race in Michigan; he’s second to Busch in Cup wins this year (Busch has eight, Edwards five) and the second favorite for Saturday night at +550.

This is the second stop of the Cup season in Bristol, following the Food City 500 in March. Richard Childress Racing actually swept that race: Jeff Burton, Kevin Harvick and Clint Bowyer finished 1-2-3. However, the race itself was an anomaly. Busch took the lead and promptly spun out on the wet track. Harvick pushed Stewart (in second place at the time) into the wall with two laps remaining. Hamlin lost the lead to fuel problems.

This isn’t the first time Stewart has been snakebitten at Bristol. He took the pole in the spring race in 2006 and led 245 laps before finishing 12th. At last year’s Food City 500, Stewart was in the lead for 257 laps before his car (then a Dodge) suffered a fuel pressure malfunction. Then Hamlin lost the lead and had to settle for 14th; worse, at last year’s Sharpie 500, Hamlin failed to finish after his engine blew.

Although Thunder Valley is the kind of environment that invites chaos, the other cars on the track can’t rely on misfortune to continue dogging the Joe Gibbs team. Harvick is the lowest-priced driver from Richard Childress Racing at +1000. Burton is +2000, and Bowyer is +3000.