The next stop for the Chase For The Cup is Richmond this weekend as NASCAR goes under the lights with its three-quarter mile track for the Capital City 400.
Joe Gibbs Racing has dominated the track recently, and looks to keep that record Saturday night. Teammates Kyle Busch and Denny Hamlin have combined to win four of the last five races here and Bovada’s NASCAR Betting Lines have them listed as the top two favorites to win again.
For Busch, there’s no better chance to claim his first win of the year. He hasn’t been great this year and sits at 13th in the point standings with just one top-5 finish. But he’s won three of the last six time he’s raced at Richmond with 11 top-5s and seems to be the odds-on favorite to finally get the flag. He hasn’t finished worse than sixth in any of his last seven races there.
“We haven’t had the runs that we are looking for quite yet,” Busch told FOX News. “I’ve been missing a little bit of comfort in our cars this year, but I feel like we’re slowly gaining it back. I look for a certain feel in the car, and we just haven’t quite hit on it, yet. We’ve kept working at making that better.
“We’ve been working hard at gaining some spots in the points. We’ve got some really good race tracks for us coming up with places like Richmond this weekend, Charlotte, and Dover, so I feel confident in the progress that Dave and I have made and feel like we have some good runs in us coming up. We’ve come out early in the season and won races before, but we want to first get ourselves in the Chase, and hit our stride so we’re our strongest at the end of the year.”
Busch is favored by Bovada to win with 5/1 odds. But he’s not out front by much. Denny Hamlin (11/2) and Jimmie Johnson (13/2) are real possibilities to win the race, too.
There’s nobody with more momentum than Hamlin, who has won at Richmond twice in his last five races. His average finish there is 7.6, according to The Spread, and his driver rating of 117.6 is better than any other driver in the field. He’s fifth in the point standings, just 23 points out of first place so there’s major incentive to win this weekend.
For Johnson, it’s either feast or famine at Richmond. He’s bombed there a few times. So much so that even with three career wins, he still has an average finish of 17.2.