Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr. open as the early odds favorites at PointsBet SportsBook to win Saturday’s Federated Auto Parts 400 at Richmond Raceway (7:30 p.m. ET, NBCSN).
Hamlin is listed at +440. Coming off last week’s victory at Darlington, he is locked into the Round of 12, but Hamlin will want to add more playoff points after getting shut out of Victory Lane during the regular season.
This is Hamlin’s home track, which should give him an advantage. In terms of career average finishes, it is also his second-best on courses on which he has run more than three Cup races. His average finish of 9.0 in 21 starts ranks it behind only Darlington, where he has a 7.1 average finish in 19 races.
Also at +440, Truex enters the weekend with two victories and a perfect record of top-five finishes in his last five Richmond races. He was the favorite for this spring’s Toyota Owners 400 at +425 before finishing fifth in that race.
One way to view American odds is to move the decimal point two positions to the left. That will let a bettor know what they will make on a $1 bet. The return on investment for +440 odds is $4.40. For bettors more comfortable with fractional odds, a line of +300 is the same as 3/1.
Kyle Larson is ranked a distant third with odds of +725. This is just the third time in the last 13 races Larson has not been ranked either as the favorite or second-best at PointsBet. Larson has one win on this track from 2017 and a second-place finish in 2016, but in five races since visiting Victory Lane, he has not cracked the top five.
Ranked fourth with a line of +775 is Kyle Busch. After retiring with crash damage at Darlington and finishing 35th, he is below the bubble to make the Round of 12. Busch swept Victory Lane at Richmond in 2018 and finished second in the 2019 playoff race. Three of his last four results at Richmond have been outside the top five, including a sixth-place effort in this race last year and an eighth this spring.
Joey Logano is ranked fifth with a line of +800. This is only the third time that he has cracked the top five in PointsBet’s ranking in the last 17 weeks. Richmond is also his second-best track among those that have hosted more than a few events. Logano has 10 top-five finishes in his last 16 attempts there, including two victories. He finished third in this race last year and was third in the spring.
Chase Elliott can be found outside the top five in seventh. His line of +1200 makes him a longshot on a track where he’s earned three top-five finishes in 11 starts. His best finish of second came in 2018.
The winner of the spring Richmond race, Alex Bowman is listed at +2000. While that also makes him a dark horse, the traders significantly lowered his line from the +3300 he paid out in the Federated Auto Parts 400.
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Dan Beaver handicaps NASCAR races for NBC Sports Edge.