After a wild and chaotic Daytona 500 ended with William Byron avoiding a melee at the front of the field to take his second consecutive Daytona 500, the NASCAR Cup Series heads to Atlanta Motor Speedway for another drafting track race.
Sunday's Ambetter Health 400 will have some differences from Daytona, as Atlanta is a mile shorter in length and narrower, making track position even more important than it was at Daytona.
That said, drafting acumen is still the name of the game, and two drivers have caught my attention as undervalued relative to the chances they finish toward the front.
NASCAR Odds, Picks for Atlanta
*Odds as of Thursday morning
Alex Bowman
The first of the two drivers is Hendrick Motorsports' (HMS) Alex Bowman. His HMS teammates all have odds of 20-1 or shorter to win, yet Bowman has performed just as well — if not better– on drafting tracks in some cases.
Consider that Bowman was actually ahead of eventual Daytona 500 winner Byron on the final restart, and led more laps than the two-time Daytona 500 winner.
Bowman doesn't just consistently run near the front at these races, but he finishes well too. In 13 drafting track starts since the start of the 2023 season, Bowman has six finishes of sixth or better and the second-best average finish in these pack races over that span.
In the most recent Atlanta race, Bowman had the single-best average running position, clocking in with a 5.27 average over the course of 266 laps. All 266 of those laps he ran inside the top 15 and he finished fifth on the day.
My model has Bowman as the best value, and my favorite bet is on his top-five finish rather than his outright win since he has yet to claim victory in one of these drafting races.
That said, he's come close, so I'm fully on board with laddering up to a top-three finish at +900 and even sprinkling on him as the winner at 30-1 odds.
The Bets: Alex Bowman Top-5 Finish (+400 at FanDuel), Top-3 Finish (+900 at FanDuel), and to Win (+3000 at FanDuel) | Bet to: +350, +700, +2400
Ricky Stenhouse, Jr.
Stenhouse is a bit different from Bowman in that he's more of a boom-or-bust option, but he's also surprisingly shown consistency at Atlanta.
In his four non-DNF starts at Atlanta, which also happen to be the last four races here, Stenhouse has an average finish of 11.8, including finishes of sixth and 10th.
Both his DNFs occurred in the first year on the reconfigured track in 2022. In the first of the two races, Stenhouse led 22 laps but blew a tire while leading. In the other race, Stenhouse once again got to the front of the field, but had to retire with an engine failure on lap 162.
And in the season opener this year at Daytona, Stenhouse found himself in the front two rows of cars with 15 laps to go before putting a block on Joey Logano that triggered the first of three late-race crashes.
Stenhouse is a three-time drafting track winner and has shown he can get to the front at Atlanta, too.
Notably, his most recent Atlanta race was arguably his best yet from start to finish, with his best average running position of the six races on this track's current configuration.
Like Bowman, I'll go up the ladder with Stenhouse and take all of his finishing position bets from a top 10 to the outright winner.
The Bets: Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. Top-10 Finish (+225 at ESPN), Top-5 Finish (+650 at ESPN), Top-3 Finish (+1300 at FanDuel), and to Win (+4500 at DraftKings) | Bet to: +225, +650, +1300, +4000
