Pennzoil 400 Predictions: NASCAR At Vegas Odds, Picks & Best Bets

Bookies

28 February 2023

What a difference one week makes for Kyle Busch. After earning his first victory this past Sunday at Fontana with new team Richard Childress Racing—and his first victory on asphalt in 19 months—Busch is now the favorite to prevail on his hometown track.

Busch is at +600 odds on to win Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where his lone career victory came in 2009. Rowdy could very well be two-for-two so far in 2023, given that he led the Daytona 500 after the final regulation lap only to get crashed in overtime.

It’s all quite a turnaround for a driver whose lone victory last season came on the Bristol dirt, and who cratered to his worst final points ranking in a decade.

For enthusiasts, the question now becomes whether this Busch revival has staying power. Even at 37, there’s no doubting Busch’s talent, and clearly, a new environment can do wonders for someone whose former workplace had perhaps grown a little stale.

And RCR has been close—Busch’s teammate Austin Dillon was runner-up at Fontana last year, and former RCR driver Tyler Reddick posted three straight top-10s at Las Vegas.

Busch, the best driver RCR has had since Kevin Harvick, is clearly capable of closing that gap. Oddsmakers certainly think this marriage is for real: Busch is now second in NASCAR title futures at +650, even though Childress hasn’t claimed a crown since Dale Earnhardt in 1994.

Pennzoil 400 Odds

Pennzoil 400 Betting Tips

Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano lead all active drivers with three wins each at Las Vegas, with Logano claiming the most recent event on the 1.5-mile track last fall. Keselowski hasn’t won there since 2018, but his Roush car has finally shown some real promise by leading 42 laps at Daytona and finishing seventh at Fontana.

Logano owns the best career average finish at Las Vegas at 8.5, followed by two-time track winner Martin Truex Jr. at 10.1 and Busch at 10.8.

Nine active drivers have won races at Las Vegas, with Kevin Harvick a two-time winner and Denny Hamlin, Alex Bowman, Busch and Kyle Larson each claiming one each.

Busch has come incredibly close to breaking through on his hometown track again—he’s finished seventh or better in eight of his last 10 starts there, and has placed third in three of his last four. He led 49 laps in last year’s spring race before a late yellow allowed Bowman to steal the victory.

Last year’s championship runner-up Ross Chastain finished third and second in the two Vegas races in 2022, leading 151 laps in the process. Reddick, now with 23XI Racing, has finished sixth, seventh and sixth over his last three Las Vegas races.

Hamlin has been top-five in four of his last five in Sin City, a span that includes his lone victory there in 2021, while Truex has finished eighth or better in five straight starts in the Nevada desert.

Pennzoil 400 Best Bets & Predictions

Ross Chastain to Win

Odds:

The Watermelon Man clearly has something figured out on the fast Las Vegas tri-oval, where he led 83 laps last spring and another 68 last fall.

Nobody benefitted from the introduction of the next-gen car more than Chastain, who took to it immediately and vaulted from also-ran to legitimate title threat. And last week at Fontana, where he led 91 laps and finished third, offered a strong indication that he still has his touch on intermediate tracks.

Take Chastain to win at +1200 on .

Kyle Busch Top 3

Odds:

The pressure Busch feels to win at Las Vegas is immense, and it’s only magnified by the repeated close calls he’s suffered on his hometown track the past two years.

From a sheer performance standpoint, nobody is better there; that Busch doesn’t have the wins to show it has to be incredibly frustrating. All of those ancillary factors lead us to like Busch better as a top-five option, which still pays off should he return to Victory Lane.

Brad Keselowski Top 10

Odds:

Are we a believer that Roush-Fenway-Keselowski Racing has finally turned it around? Maybe not. Do we like the progress we’ve seen the first two weeks of 2023? Absolutely. It certainly helps that we’re at Vegas, where Keselowski was once awesome in a Penske car: from 2014-19 he won three times and never finished worse than seventh.

If he can combine that institutional knowledge with the performance we’ve seen the past two weeks, a breakthrough for RFK could well be at hand.