NASCAR: Kyle Larson too heavy of a championship favorite?

Kyle Larson is listed as the heavy favorite to win the 2021 NASCAR Cup Series championship. While he has earned the right to be the favorite, are his odds too high?

Hendrick Motorsports’ Kyle Larson ended a five-race win drought last Sunday at Watkins Glen International and secured his series-high fifth win of the 2021 NASCAR Cup Series season and first since winning the inaugural race at Nashville Superspeedway back in June.

Larson has been the betting favorite to win the 2021 championship for the last two-plus months across the board, and WynnBET is no exception to that.

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But at this point in the season, with three races remaining before the four-round, 10-race playoffs, is the driver of the #5 Chevrolet too heavy of a favorite?

WynnBET lists Larson at +260 to win this year’s championship at Phoenix Raceway in November.

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This implies that he has a 27.78% chance to win the title. Implied chance is always overstated, otherwise the sportbooks wouldn’t ever make any money — if you’re new to NASCAR betting and don’t quite understand that, make sure to read our guide here for better understanding moving forward.

But even with the overstated implied chances, only one other driver is listed at above 15%. That driver is Chase Elliott, the reigning champion and one of Larson’s teammates. He is listed as the second favorite at +550.

Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Kyle Busch (+650), Denny Hamlin (+800) and Martin Truex Jr. (+900) round out the top five.

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Larson has certainly established himself as the favorite at this point in the season, having already amassed a series-high 37 playoff points to carry with him through the round of 8 and potentially to the Championship 4; nobody else has more than 20. He would get 15 more by winning the regular season title as well; nobody else would get more than 10.

But odds of +260 are what you what would expect to see for the Championship 4 drivers once the Championship 4 rolls around, not at this stage in the season with so many other legitimate contenders. “Heating up just in time for the playoffs” is perhaps the most overhyped concept in Cup Series racing when you consider how the playoffs work.

We saw last year how little regular season success means if you have a bad — or even mediocre — race or two in a given round of the playoffs. Stewart-Haas Racing’s Kevin Harvick dominated the series, winning seven times in the regular season, winning the regular season title, and even adding two wins in the opening round of the playoffs.

His round of 8 wasn’t even that terrible. In fact, he had a runner-up finish in one of the three races. But it wasn’t enough to even advance to the Championship 4 at Phoenix Raceway, much less win the title.

Of course, if your logic is that Larson is going to win the title, you don’t really care what the odds are, because you’re going to win money if you bet on him whether he is listed at +140 or +1400 or +14000. And that is precisely the reason why the sportsbooks have set the odds where they are — probably a bit higher than they should be.

They have no interest in losing money by listing him unreasonably low at something such as +2500, but they need to make the odds attractive just enough to garner bets, something that they’re probably not going to do much if they list him far too high at something such as -250. And that logic goes beyond Larson. It’s a business.

With that being said, Larson does have a strong history at Phoenix Raceway. If he is able to advance to the Championship 4, he is probably going to be a legitimate threat to win the race and the title. He has finished outside of the top seven in just two of his last nine starts at the track with five top four finishes.

While he has yet to win at the track, Elliott also entered last year’s Championship 4 without a win there and won the race and the title.

If Larson does get to the Championship 4, he is obviously going to have odds better than +260 to win. But his odds would still probably be in that vicinity, considering there will be three other championship contenders who simply need to finish higher than Larson and two others to win the title.

The antepenultimate race of the regular season, the Verizon 200 at the Brickyard, is scheduled to take place this afternoon. This race is set to be broadcast live from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course on NBC beginning at 1:00 p.m. ET. Be sure to start your free trial of FuboTV today if you have yet to do so!

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