Tyler Reddick has won the first two races of the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season, and he'll lead the field to the green flag for Sunday's DuraMAX Grand Prix of COTA (3:30 pm ET, FOX) after winning the pole in Saturday's qualifying.
COTA is a 2.4-mile road course marking the first non-drafting track to grace the 2026 schedule. NASCAR odds for the race peg road course ace Shane van Gisbergen as the odds-on-favorite, but Reddick sits second behind him at most books.
Road course racing is a very different discipline, not only from superspeedway drafting racing, but also from oval racing in general, which makes specialists like SVG pop. However, we can't ignore the practice and qualifying data from this weekend, which provides us with actual metrics of speed from cars on track this weekend.
My practice FLAGS will be extremely helpful in analyzing any race, and that's a great place to start with your NASCAR analysis.
Rolling that up with track and road course history for each driver, my model has found a couple of values for my NASCAR best bets for COTA.
Dr. Nick's NASCAR Best Bets for COTA
*Odds as of Saturday evening
A.J. Allmendinger
The Dinger is popping in my model thanks to his strong history at COTA, including four top-eight runs in race FLAGS in his last four starts here.
The road course ace also shined in practice this weekend, ranking fifth in speed-based FLAGS and third in quantile-based FLAGS (robust to slower laps which may have had traffic).
That puts his top-10 chances at more than 55% for me, which makes +120 at Caesars and even +100 at bet365 solid value.
If you already bet him after I talked about his top-10 on the Running Hot podcast, consider laddering his finishing position, I have his top-5 odds chances better than 2-1, and +250 or longer is available everywhere that has top-5 odds posted as of Saturday evening, with the best at theScore with +375.
The Bet: A.J. Allmendinger Top-10 Finish (+120, Caesars) Top-5 Finish (+375, theScore) — Bet to: -110 and +250 respectively
Zane Smith
Third-year driver Zane Smith is a former two-time COTA winner in the Truck Series and made his mark this weekend, starting just outside the top-10 in 11th.
However, it wasn't just his one-lap speed that impressed.
Smith was one of just three drivers, along with Allmendinger and William Byron, to be above the 50% mark in all 10 practice metrics I model. That means he has solid overall speed, long run speed, peak speed, and his tires aren't degrading a ton, which produced a lot of consistency.
While that might not produce the upside we want, that's exactly what we're looking for in a top-10 contender.
My model has him just shy of 18% to finish in the top 10, yet he's as long as 8-1 at bet365 and 9-1 at Caesars. If we want to leave a couple of percentage points for model error, we could say anything better than about 15% implied odds, which translates to +567 is bettable.
I'll round that to +600 as my playable line.
The Bet: Zane Smith Top-10 Finish (+900 at Caesars) — Bet to: +600
