INDIANAPOLIS — The first major sport to return to live action is coming back. On Thursday, NASCAR announced their immediate plans to resume their season as they will start back up on May 17 at the Darlington Raceway. Over a course of 10 days, the NASCAR Cup Series will race on four of them (May 17, May 20, May 24, May 27).

With no live sports in what would have been 10 weeks by time we get to that point, NASCAR is going to be under a magnifying glass of the sports betting world. That’s a very good thing for them too.

NASCAR is certainly going to get more fans by being first out the gates. There’s so many people that are maybe not fans of racing, or casual sporting fans in general or even not a fan of sports at all that are going to be watching because it’s the first live sporting event shown since early March and gives us something at least closer to resembling our old normal.

Plus, with sports betting being more and more legal here in the United States, the wagering world was going crazy at the start of this year. We came into March with a lot of momentum and a lot of big time events coming up to bet on.

Then, COVID-19 hit our shores and took everything away. Conference basketball tournaments, the NCAA Tournament, the end of the NBA regular season, the NBA playoffs, the start of the MLB season and the Masters were all coming up. We got none of it really since March 11.

After a wait of 10 weeks, we have a live sporting event to watch and one we can make money off of. While prior to this pandemic I was a firm advocate of placing wagers on racing, I’m going to be a little more hesitant now.

While I don’t want to scare anyone away, because there’s money to be made here, it’s just going to be harder than ever before to win on races.

Prior to this unwanted pandemic, betting on racing was actually quite easy and very profitable. Betting on races isn’t like betting on stick-and-ball sports. In football, basketball, baseball, soccer, etc, there’s one winner and one loser. You have a 50-50 chance of getting it right.

In racing, lets take NASCAR for example, since they’re the first ones back. We have at least 36 cars in every race. In racing, you have one winner and the rest losers, so that would mean one winner and at the very least, 35 losers.

While that sounds like odds aren’t in your favor, I had a method of making it way more in your favor than what that sounds.

To handicap a NASCAR race, you have several factors in eliminating drivers down to a core 3-5. That’s the safety zone because you can’t just bet one driver each race and expect to win. That’s like saying find me the needle in the haystack. It’s impossible. There’s too many factors in a race that could take out the best driver. A bad pit stop, a faulty car part, an engine being blown, a tire coming a part, a crash not of your doing, anything can happen at any time. After all, a car going in speeds near 200 mph with 35 of your closest friends inches from your side isn’t safe. These drivers are staring danger in the eyes every lap. 

So, you need a safety net by grabbing 3-5 drivers to be safe so that even if one or two have trouble, you have a couple more in place. 

Now, how do you get from 36 to 3-5? That’s quite simple actually. Some of the 36 teams are just there to race with no aspirations of winning. They don’t have the money nor the equipment to do so and are just happy with a top 20. We can eliminate them easy. That leaves really the top teams. To decipher from them, we look at past track history as some drivers just aren’t good at certain race tracks. Once you eliminate the drivers that aren’t good at those tracks, you then move to long run practice speeds.

While some look at practice speed charts, I caution that method. Single lap speed is one thing, but these races aren’t sprints. Most are 400-500 miles on length. You need a car built for speed for 200+ laps run, not one.

NASCAR gives me 5-lap, 10-lap, 15-lap, 20-lap and 25-lap reports. I can see who’s car gets better as practice laps go on. The cars that are good on long run speed (20-25 laps) but are also good on (5-15 lap) runs, they’re the ones to beat.

Throw all into a formula and you get a handful of drivers who can win. Then, look at the odds and make sure you wager enough on each so that if you bet five drivers, you know you have one winner and four losers and your winner earns enough money to cover the loses from the others.

It’s a near perfect system.

Now though, due to the coronavirus still being around, NASCAR has to take safety precautions in order to race. They’re not going to practice for all four races and not qualify for three of them too.

That means when they show up to race, they’re doing just that — race. We don’t have any reports other than past history to base our picks off of. Even that isn’t the best method to use as your only stat to pull up because things change between years.

Plus, we haven’t raced at Darlington in May in years. We usually race there on Labor Day weekend when it’s hot and slick and a night race. The first race back is a Sunday afternoon race under day time conditions. I don’t know how much, if anything, can be translated over from past September stats to this year’s race in May.

That means we have no data to collect or look at before wagering this race.

Plus, the first Darlington race will be the first time that these drivers have been in a race car in literally 70 days. They have no practice to get used to it as their first laps turned are in race conditions. They’re doing that on arguably the toughest track on NASCAR’s schedule. They don’t call Darlington “Too Tough To Tame” or the “Lady in Black” for nothing.

That’s why betting on NASCAR is going to be tough moving forward.