Memorial Day Weekend is a racing tradition. Sports bettors can wake up Sunday morning and bet on the Formula 1 race in Monaco. At noon, it will be time to double-down with the 107th running of the Indy 500. Finally, NASCAR closes the long day of racing with a long race. The Coca-Cola 600 is 600 miles of stock car racing at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
As always, trust the data but also trust your eyes. Here are the best bets for the NASCAR Cup Series Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The NASCAR Cup Series Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte has been postponed to Monday at 3:00 p.m. ET.
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The racing package changes back to the regular intermediate-track package this weekend. This has been the common package over the last month (Darlington, Kansas and Dover). The Toyotas and the Hendrick Chevys have been the fastest cars in this package. Good luck fading the chalk. Good luck fading the chalk in a race that historically favors the elite.
Race Winner — Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte
Kyle Larson +550
The last American hero is Kyle Larson. Yes! He’s a sim racer, a rich man, an ex-cancelled driver, a Cali kid who hard-charges sprint cars on dirt. Mother dog! He is the lead-footed Asian-American from Elk Grove, the true vision of the modern racer.
Larson is listed every week, and he hit last week. He hit hard. Larson walloped the field in the All-Star race. He did it all weekend and all week. He won the Truck Series race at North Wilkesboro on Saturday in dominant fashion. On Tuesday, he stunk up the show at Wayne County Speedway, a the dirt track in Northern Ohio. A week earlier, he won at a dirt track in Southern Ohio — Atomic Speedway. A couple weeks before that, on a whim, Larson decided to race a modified for the first time ever. Sure enough, he won, making it 10 wins across seven different racing divisions at El Dora. Michael Jordan was the greatest basketball player of all time and he was a decent baseball player. The novice will lump all styles of racing together. Experts know they’re different. Dirt to stock car might as well be basketball to baseball. Even the dirt disciplines differ drastically. He’s the greatest ever. He knows it. His beer-shotgunning wife knows it (she’s also a dirt racer and the sister of the No. 2 dirt racer in the world). And you know it. But he’s not done proving it to you. Where did he spend his day last Thursday? He wasn’t racing. He was studying at Indianapolis at the Indy 500 practice.
William Byron +700
It’s the same drivers every week. It is. Look at the data. Earlier this season, Byron won at Las Vegas and followed with another win the next week at Phoenix (a different racing package but Phoenix has intermediate-track tendencies). When the intermediate-track package returned a month ago, Byron led the most laps at Dover. The next week, he went from three laps down at Kansas to a third-place finish. After failing to visit victory lane with a race-winning car in the prior two weeks, Byron sealed the deal with his first win at Darlington. Charlotte is Byron’s home track. Technically, the track is in Concord. Byron grew up just down the road in Mooresville and just down the street from Jimmie Johnson. This is not just a Crown Jewel event. It’s a big one for Byron.
Check back later this week for additional NASCAR matchup bets and prop bets as they become available on DraftKings Sportsbook.
Race Winner — Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte
Denny Hamlin +800
Larson and Byron have the wins. Hendrick has been dominant this season. Over the last month, the gap between Hendrick and the JGR Toyotas has closed. That’s the storyline, but that’s not the real story. The gap does not exist. Martin Truex Jr. (+1200) won at Dover and recorded the second-quickest average lap time at Kansas. Hamlin had the fastest average lap time at Kansas and won the race. He was fourth in speed at Dover and fifth at Las Vegas and Auto Club (Fontana). An average of those four rankings comes out as 3.8 — that’s the best in the intermediate-track package. Hamlin won the pole for the 2022 Coca-Cola 600 and lost the lead within the first 10 laps. He spent the next 400 laps running inside the top 10. In overtime, Hamlin took the lead on lap 405 and went on to win at Charlotte for the first time in 31 tries.
Ryan Blaney +1500
High speed tracks suit Ryan Blaney’s driving style. Dover, Charlotte, Texas, and even Bristol for that matter, are fast tracks and they’re Blaney’s better tracks. Several weeks ago at Dover, Blaney’s average lap time was the fastest. He did that without leading a lap. His team nailed the Dover setup. That setup is not too different from Charlotte. He’ll be fast again this weekend. Team Penske had a strong run in 2022 when the schedule shifted to intermediate tracks. That run was highlighted by Blaney’s $1 million win at Texas. He was running in the top 5 in last season’s Coca-Cola 600 but got wrecked on a restart on lap 192.
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