NASCAR heads to Mexico City for the first points-paying Cup Series race outside the United States since 1958.
Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez is a 2.417-mile road course with 15 turns, and with two practice sessions in play, there's a solid set of data to work with to gauge driver speed.
My practice FLAGS metric will be quite useful, especially given we have it for both sessions, as well as combining the two sessions into one. Using that, I've found a driver that made big gains between sessions, and who is somewhat secretly a solid road course racer.
Let me break it down with my Viva México 250 best bet and prediction.
NASCAR at Mexico City Best Bet
There's a driver in this race who has finished inside the top 10 in four of his last nine road course starts, with two 12th and one 13th-place finish over that span. That means he's been within three spots of a top-10 finish 77.8% of the time in those nine races, yet is going off at +155 odds to finish inside the top 10.
I'm talking about Team Penske's Ryan Blaney, who also has a road course win at the Charlotte Roval back in 2018 on his resume.
Blaney has also been fantastic at what I believe is Mexico City's best comparable track, and that's the road course at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which the Cup Series ran on from 2021-2023.
There, Blaney finished second in 2021, and in the two years of the Next Gen car in 2022-2023, Blaney had a top-10 average running position between the two races.
Looking at practice, Blaney had some pretty big tire falloff in the first practice session despite putting up some fast laps early on in the tire life. However, I'm much more interested in what he did in the second practice session.
In that session, from laps 2 to 11 at-pace laps on his tires (I removed lap 1 since several drivers ran slow first out laps), Blaney was super fast. In fact, among all drivers that ran at least 11 at-pace laps, Blaney had the fastest speed from at-pace laps 2 to 11 among all drivers (16 total).
That ranked Blaney second in FLAGS for the second practice session, behind only Shane van Gisbergen, which is pretty solid company to have.
That big improvement was about to pay off in qualifying, but Blaney made a mistake late in the qualifying run, which relegated him to an 18th-place starting spot.
However, I believe that car has top-10 speed, so I love getting significant plus odds with a +155 line for his top-10 finish at FanDuel. My model gives him a 43.8% chance of a top-10 finish, so this is good to +130.
The Bet: Ryan Blaney Top-10 Finish (+155 at FanDuel) | Bet to: +130
