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NASCAR America: Championship 4 assess their odds of winning

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The Championship 4 drivers join NASCAR America in New York to preview Sunday's race in Homestead-Miami.

When Dale Jarrett sat down with the Championship 4 in NBC’s New Your City studios for NASCAR America’s Tuesday show, Las Vegas’ oddsmakers had Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch designated as co-favorites to win the championship at 2/1. Martin Truex Jr. was only slightly lower at 11/4 while last week’s self-proclaimed favorite Joey Logano was at 9/2.

Jarrett asked each of the playoff contenders to assess their chances of winning that bet.

“You can look at odds all day long and look at how many times you’re favorited or not favorited and the races you have or haven’t won in those scenarios,” Busch told Jarrett. “It just comes down to the whole aspect of the race day and what happens in that day and in that race.”

For Harvick, overcoming the obstacles that rise up in a driver’s way during the 26 regular-seasonraces and the nine playoff races means they have already defied the odds.

“Just to get to this point is not that easy,” Harvick said. “You have to survive a lot of things throughout the year and put yourself in position. We’ve all raced against each other at some point for the exact same thing in the national championship.

“The hardest part is over, in my opinion. Getting here is the hardest part. Obviously you want to cap it off and win a championship.”

Handicapping NASCAR races is tricky. So many things have to go right in order to win a race while so many more things can go wrong. Last year, when Busch got caught in traffic in the season finale, it allowed Truex to scoot out to an insurmountable lead.

“We dominated the mile-and-a-halfs last year and honestly (Busch) had the better car (at Miami),” Truex said. “And the race played out played into our strengths. That could happen at any point in time this weekend for any of us four.”

For more, watch the video above.

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