NASCAR heads to the 1.33-mile concrete track, Nashville Superspeedway, for tonight's Cracker Barrel 400 (7 p.m. ET, Prime Video).
Nashville represents the fourth-straight intermediate track points-paying race, and notably, practice times have been extremely useful over the first three races at Texas, Kansas, and Charlotte to predict race speed.
In particular, my FLAGS metric nailed Larson and Chastain in each of the last two weeks as clearly the best cars. The week prior, it pinned Austin Cindric as fastest in practice, and he won Stage 1 before ultimately running into issues with a poorly timed pit stop just before a caution, then getting caught up in a late wreck.
So it should be no surprise that I'll be heavily relying on practice FLAGS to find some value for tonight's NASCAR best bets for Nashville.
Cracker Barrel 400 Best Bets
DraftKings is hanging a ton of head-to-head bets this week, and that's the market I'm looking to attack.
I'm showing pretty clear value on four of these matchup bets, so without breaking down each individual matchup, I'll just list them with their FLAGS rating and their median finishing position from my model.
1. Tyler Reddick -110 over Christopher Bell
- FLAGS: Reddick 89.6% (1st), Bell 74.9% (8th)
- Med. Finish: Reddick 6.5, Bell 7.5
2. Cody Ware -110 over J.J. Yeley
- FLAGS: Ware 16.4% (36th), Yeley 4.6% (38th)
- Med. Finish: Ware 30.5, Yeley 31.5
3. William Byron -115 over Kyle Larson
- FLAGS: Byron 85.3% (4th), Larson 57.9% (16th)
- Med. Finish: Byron 5.5, Larson 6.5
4. Chase Briscoe -120 over Joey Logano
- FLAGS: Briscoe 78.7% (5th), Logano 49.8% (21st)
- Med. Finish: Briscoe 11.5, Logano 13.5
Notably, in all four of these matchups the driver who I'm betting on is also starting ahead of their opponent, so we're firing off with the early advantage on cars that also practiced faster.
I'm also going to have a little fun and parlay these four bets at DraftKings at +1149 odds. It's quite unlikely to hit, but it's a fun way to compound these edges.
