NASCAR Talladega Betting Preview: 2020 YellaWood 500

Sunday’s YellaWood 500 at Talladega Superspeedway’s beastly high-banked 2.66-mile layout is the ultimate wild card race for the Playoffs with only three drivers safe from dropping below the eighth-place cut line. It’s the fifth race of the Playoffs and second of three in the Round of 12.

TALLADEGA BETTING RESOURCES
Date: Sunday, October 4, 2020
TV-Time: NBCSN, 2:05 p.m. ET
Venue: Talladega Superspeedway
Location: Talladega, Alabama

Kurt Busch's win last week at Las Vegas has automatically qualified for the Round of 8. Kevin Harvick and Denny Hamlin are also safe at the moment based on a head start in Playoff points because of winning so many regular-season races and stages.

Brad Keselowski is in 4th-place in points (3,059), only 39 points ahead of 12th-place Austin Dillon. The bottom four drivers will be chopped next week at the Charlotte Roval, which in a way is another wild card because road courses are difficult for half the drivers.

What makes Talladega the King of wild cards is that no driver is safe from the "Big One" unsuspectedly grabbing him and ruining his day, and it always happens. The superspeedway race package is so equal for all teams that almost any driver can win, and because the cars go faster when bunching up together in the draft, they all do it sometimes going four-wide, bumper/bumper in a massive pack. One car wiggles, another car reacts, 25 other cars also react, collide, and it becomes a big pile up.

This is why I don’t bet driver matchups because a lot of my top rated drivers for Talladega get caught up in that mess.

Driver ratings don’t hold up at Talladega which is the Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook doesn’t have any driver lower than 10/1 odds to win, but have the Top-30 drivers at 50/1 or less. For example, Bubba Wallace is usually a 500/1 betting choice, but he’s at 30/1 odds this week.

So no matchups or props for the race, but I do bet more drivers to win than I do for a normal race. I usually end up with about nine drivers to win because the drivers that do well on the superspeedway are plentiful. Joey Logano is part of the Ford gang that has won nine of the last 10 Talladega races, winning three times, and he’s being offered at 10/1 odds, as is his Penske teammate Ryan Blaney who has won the last two there.

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