The NASCAR Cup Series races on its third shorter flat track of the year as the series heads to Iowa Speedway for the Iowa Corn 350 Powered by Ethanol (3:30 p.m. ET, USA).
Iowa Speedway is in its second year after a partial repave, which saw the lower grooves repaved in the turns, while the rest of the track still has the older surface. That's created a unique situation where cars can be a bit sketchy going into the corners, and suddenly grip up.
We've seen a few wobbles and moments in practice, but we've also seen one manufacturer struggle in practice speed, opening up value on another manufacturer.
Iowa Corn 350 Best Bets
In practice, Ford was notably slower than the Chevy and Toyota cars, but the blue ovals did recapture some speed as they qualified well, claiming spots four, five, and six on the starting grid.
On the flip side, Toyota was strong in practice, and while they grabbed the pole with Chase Briscoe, no other Toyota qualified inside the top 10. However, I'm expecting Toyota's practice pace to be similar to their race pace.
In practice, Toyota had seven of the top 19 cars in my practice FLAGS metric, which is a strong measure of overall speed. That includes Denny Hamlin, who was fourth in that metric, which is important because Hamlin usually races better than his practice speed.
Polesitter Briscoe was seventh, while last week's winner Bubba Wallace was eighth. Notably, short-flat master Christopher Bell was 12th, and is another driver who should out-race his practice speed.
Their win odds are also boosted by Ford's lack of speed in practice, where only Brad Keselowski was inside the top-10 in group-adjusted practice FLAGS. Add in Austin Cindric, Ryan Blaney, and Chris Buescher, and there were only four blue ovals inside the top half of the field in practice speed.
Chevrolet should clearly be the favorite among the three manufacturers, and they are rightly priced as such.
However, in my opinion and as my model believes, DraftKings has Toyota and Ford too close, with Ford +215 and Toyota +220.
There's value on Toyota at +220, as my model has them closer to +150 as fair value. To leave some wiggle room since three strong Fords did show a bit of qualifying pace, I'm fine playing this down to +180.
The Bet: Toyota Winning Manufacturer (+220 at DraftKings) | Bet to: +180
