The NASCAR Cup Series is at the "Tricky Triangle" this week for The Great American Getaway 400 at Pocono Raceway (2:00 p.m. ET, Prime Video).
Pocono is a 2.5-mile, triangle-shaped track with three different radius corners, each with varying degrees of (relatively flat) banking, and three different straightaway lengths. In geometry class, we called that a scalene triangle, and with three differently priced manufacturers for this race, I'll be scaling that scalene definition to the betting world.
When we examine track history and practice times, one manufacturer stands out with a few undervalued drivers, so I'll take the lot of them for the win.
Let's dive in and check out our Great American Getaway 400 Odds, Picks and Predictions for Pocono.
NASCAR at Pocono Best Bet
As I do every race, I take a close look at my practice FLAGS metric to identify which drivers stand out and if there are any trends in the FLAGS data.
As it turns out, there was a pretty clear trend right off the bat.
Each of the top-four drivers in my group-adjusted FLAGS was piloting a Ford, with Ryan Blaney leading Chris Buescher, Austin Cindric, and Brad Keselowski until we reached the first non-Ford, William Byron.
The Blue Ovals also boast a relatively strong recent track history, with Blaney winning this race a year ago and setting the most fastest laps, while Buescher and Keselowski racked up the second- and fifth-most fastest laps.
Ford as a whole took home 71 of the 117 (60.7%) fastest laps, including four of the top five drivers, with Josh Berry grabbing 13 fastest laps. In addition, Cindric claimed four fastest laps, so it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that he ended up in the top four in FLAGS.
Berry is also undervalued in my model, because there's no way to account for a car not completing any representative at-speed laps, with Berry having a diffuser issue costing him pace in practice and forcing him to miss qualifying.
Even with Berry undervalued in my model, it still shows Ford having a 32.6% chance of winning this race, which translates to implied odds of +207.
If we bump Berry up a bit, this wager likely shows value at close to 2-to-1. However, as always, I like to leave some wiggle room for model error, so I'm comfortable with this down to around +220.
FanDuel is offering this at +260, which is a healthy deviation from my model's number.
Ford looked fantastic on the long run, so if you're tailing me on this, we're probably rooting for a healthy green flag run to end this race, rather than some late-race restarts where Chevy showed plenty of speed on the short run.
The Bet: Ford Winning Manufacturer (+260, FanDuel | Bet to +220)
