Tuesday, March 1, 2016

2016 Las Vegas Kobalt 400 Preview: Use Atlanta as Blueprint

Props galore for NASCAR in Las Vegas this weekend.
LAS VEGAS -- For the 19th straight year, Las Vegas gets the greatest touring show stopping by in March once again as the annual NASCAR weekend is upon us. As a bonus this season, fans will get extra day of action as a NASCAR mandated test session will occur on Thursday. Then the regular schedule begins on Friday with practice and qualifying followed up by Saturday's practices and the Xfinity Series' Boyd Gaming 300 and then Sunday's Kobalt 400.

While the Las Vegas Motor Speedway has the nicest spread among all tracks in the series, complete with its ground-breaking Neon Garage that allows fans watch to watch crews work in the garages above above giant glass windows, the real attraction the Vegas date has that no where else does is legal sports betting.

After 18 years, the regular visitors for the Vegas race have become very adept at how to wager. There are still the occasional first-timers that come to the window not knowing how the betting works, but for the most part they now come in with all their bet numbers written down and fire away. It's been a long education process, but the fans are now seasoned bettors.

Sunday's race will be the highest handled Cup race of the season, almost four times the action the second most wagered race -- Daytona 500 -- takes in. With over 160,000 fans in town just for race action, the handle piles up quickly. And the sports books around town do a great job of providing bettors with a wide array of propositions.

Just about anything that appears in a NASCAR box-score can be wagered on. Lap leaders, cautions, car number to win, manufacturer to win, margin of victory -- anything you can think of that has an official result tied to it, you'll be able to find some action on it. Then of course there's the staple of NASCAR wagering which is simply picking the winner, which almost everyone in the stands seems to have a couple tickets on.

So let's start there. Who will win? Will it be a Chevy for the seventh time in LVMS history, or a Toyota for the third time? Ford has won a track-record eight times, the last coming two years ago by Brad Keselowski (Dodge won once as well with Sterling Marlin).

Last Sunday's Atlanta race won by Jimmie Johnson gave us some great insight to what might happen Sunday at LVMS just because it was the first race of 2016 using the new low downforce package. We saw two races last season with it at Kentucky and Darlington and Joe Gibbs Racing had a huge edge over everyone while winning both races. Team Penske wasn't far behind and the Chevrolet teams like Stewart Haas Racing and Hendrick Motorsports looked a little behind.

Kevin Harvick would lead the most laps (131) at Atlanta, Kurt Busch would lead the second most (62) and Johnson third most (52) -- Chevy looks good. Matt Kenseth would lead 52 laps and Martin Truex 47 for Toyota. It was quite the turnaround from what we saw last season. Chevrolet is no longer behind, and they may have even passed the Gibbs Toyota's with the package. Richard Childress Racing and Chip Ganassi also looked fast for Chevy during Atlanta practices.

Atlanta is a 1.5-mile track like Las Vegas, but it's much faster because of a higher banking. Tire wear shouldn't be as difficult this week, but the Vegas race is 100 miles shorter than Atlanta. There were surprisingly only three cautions at Atlanta which was a big drop-off from Kentucky' s 11 and Darlington's 18 last year. Drivers are obviously more comfortable with this package and know how to roll through the corners now at maximum speed without sliding as much as last year.

Read More Here....Top-5 Prediction on VegasInsider.com

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