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This Sunday’s race will be the first in 663 races without Jimmie Johnson. The seven-time champion tested positive for COVID-19, and he withdrew from the event.

Johnson would’ve been one of the favorites this weekend, as he leads all active drivers in wins at Indianapolis with four. Without him, Sunday’s Big Machine 400 won’t be the same. The race gets underway on Sunday at 4:00 PM on NBC.

Here are your best bets for the event.

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Past Performance at Indianapolis

Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a flat, 2.5-mile rectangle, and it’s better known for its open-wheel races. NASCAR first raced here in 1994, and the sport has visited once a year ever since. As with last week’s track, Pocono, no other course on NASCAR’s schedule compares directly to Indy, so we’ll focus on the track in isolation.

Driver Name	Avg Finish	Races	Wins	Top 5’s	Top 10’s	Driver Rating (Last 5)
Kevin Harvick	8.95	19	2	7	13	120.88
Joey Logano	10.91	11	0	4	7	103.04
William Byron	11.50	2	0	1	1	84.95
Denny Hamlin	12.36	14	0	5	8	100.28
Kyle Busch	12.47	15	2	5	11	117.44
Matt Kenseth	12.68	19	0	9	12	104.36
Clint Bowyer	13.50	14	0	4	5	93.30
Brad Keselowski	13.80	10	1	2	5	95.48
Chris Buescher	15.75	4	0	0	1	68.60
Ryan Newman	16.00	19	1	3	6	78.48
Ryan Preece	16.00	1	0	0	0	67.80

One of last weekend’s winners, Kevin Harvick, leads the field in both driver rating and average finish. He has managed a top-10 or better in 68 percent of his Indy starts, and he hasn’t finished worse than eighth since he joined Stewart-Haas Racing in 2014.

Kyle Busch has the second-best driver rating despite his fifth-best average finish. Like Harvick, he has won twice here, but he’s suffered from some bad luck in the past two races. He crashed out after winning both stages in 2017, and his engine expired prematurely in 2019.

Matt Kenseth has the third-best driver rating. The veteran never finished outside of the top-10 in his five races here with Joe Gibbs Racing, and he finished 12th in 2018 with Roush-Fenway Racing.

Team Penske’s Joey Logano has the fourth-best rating and the second-best average finish. He’s never won here, but he’s finished in the top-10 63 percent of the time. Logano has led laps in five of his seven Indy races with Penske, and he almost won last year’s event here in the same package.

Like Logano, Denny Hamlin also hasn’t won here. His top-10 rate of 57 percent is less impressive, however, and he doesn’t often lead laps. Hamlin’s consistency has earned him a high rating, but he’s not a sure bet to compete for the win.

William Byron’s average finish is based on a small sample size, but it’s encouraging that his best performance came in the new package. He’s managed to lead laps in both of his career Indy appearances as well.

Lastly, Clint Bowyer’s record here deserves some scrutiny. His impressive recent driver rating of 93.3 jumps to 103.1 when you exclude his lone season with the backmarker HScott Motorsports, and he’s posted two straight top-5s at this track.

Recent Speed

Drivers can only go as fast as their cars will let them. While Indy doesn’t compare well to other tracks, NASCAR uses the same package at Indy as it does at Pocono (and all other intermediate tracks). And since both tracks are long and flat, the driver ratings from last weekend may offer some insight into what to expect this time out. The stat helps reveal trends in speed, as it weighs fastest laps, laps led, and average running position.

Driver	Driver Rating (Pocono)
Denny Hamlin	135.00
Kevin Harvick	123.00
Kyle Busch	93.95
William Byron	87.25
Clint Bowyer	84.75
Matt Kenseth	83.15
Joey Logano	74.45

Both Denny Hamlin and Kevin Harvick won last weekend, so it’s no surprise to see them atop the driver rating charts. The two combined to lead 32 percent of the laps at Pocono, and neither driver finished worse than second.

Kyle Busch posted the next-best driver rating for our non-winners. He led two laps in Sunday’s race before crashing out, and he just doesn’t seem to have brought his A-game into 2020. Joe Gibbs has shown less speed this year, however, so that may be part of the problem.

William Byron boasts the fourth-best rating of the seven. He earned one top-10 last weekend, but he failed to lead a lap.

While neither Clint Bowyer nor Matt Kenseth posted exception driver ratings last weekend, they were both reliable finishers. Bowyer earned two top-10s by finishing seventh and eighth. And while Kenseth didn’t earn a single top-10, he came close, as he finished 11th and 12th.

Joey Logano was much better than his driver rating from Pocono indicates. He led 11 laps in the first race, and he finished first in stage one and second in stage two. He didn’t do much in the second race, but his Penske teammates all looked good, so it wasn’t a problem with the team’s equipment.

Betting Odds

Let’s take a look at the betting odds for our featured drivers over at DraftKings Sportsbook.

Driver	To Win	Top-5	Top-10
Kevin Harvick	+400	-150	-500
Denny Hamlin	+500	-115	-400
Kyle Busch	+600	-108	-360
Joey Logano	+700	+120	-286
William Byron	+2800	+380	+100
Clint Bowyer	+2800	+400	+100
Matt Kenseth	+8000	+900	+225

Harvick and Hamlin have the shortest odds to win this weekend. I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here; playing one of the favorites makes a ton of sense for this race.

Best Bets for Indianapolis

Last week’s predictions went one for five in race one. They went three for five in race two.

To Win: Kevin Harvick (+400)
Harvick has the second-most wins this year with three. His average finish of 1.5 at Pocono proves that he can succeed at flat tracks, and his victory here last year shows that he can win at Indy in this package. This bet isn’t a sure thing, but it’s a relatively safe line.

To Win: Kevin Harvick AND Best Finishing Position: Denny Hamlin (+105) vs. Kevin Harvick
Let me explain. If Harvick doesn’t win this weekend’s race, then Hamlin has at last one position to finish in front of him. One side of this bet would’ve hit at both Pocono races, and if you’d made this wager in every race this year, it’d be 10 for 15.

Side of the Bet	Units	Total Bet	Odds	Total Payout	Total Profit
Kevin Harvick (Winner)	2	$2.00	+400	$10.00	$3.00 (42.9%)
Denny Hamlin (> Harvick)	5	$5.00	+105	$10.25	$3.25 (46.4%)

To play this line evenly, use a two-to-five ratio on it when distributing your units. These bets are roughly equivalent to one bet on a line of -220, and its implied odds of 68.7 are close to the 66.7 percent of races in which this bet would’ve cashed. While I recommended Hamlin to finish top-5 in my earlier article, I would use this bet instead.

To Finish Top-5: Joey Logano (+120)
Logano’s rough weekend at Pocono has DraftKings lower on him than they should be. Logano has finished top-5 in four of his seven races here with Team Penske, and he’ll start on the pole for Sunday’s race. Harvick won this race from the pole last year, and three of the top-5 finishers started in the top-5. Since I expect Logano to stay near the front on Sunday, I’m confident laying this line in the plus money.

To Finish Top-10: William Byron (+100)
Byron finished top-10 at Pocono, and I think he’ll be one to watch at Indy. Byron finished fourth here last year, and he won in his only Xfinity start at the track, beating out Joey Logano and Kyle Busch to do so. As long as this line sits in the plus money, punch it in at DraftKings.

To Finish Top-10: Clint Bowyer (+100)
Like with Byron’s line, I’ll play this only if it stays in the plus money. Bowyer has two consecutive top-5s at Indy, and he just posted a pair of top-10s at Pocono. The Stewart-Haas Fords led 93 of 270 laps last weekend, so they’ve got the speed to compete on flat tracks.

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Isaiah Sirois is a featured writer at BettingPros. For more from Isaiah, check out his archive and follow him @is_sirois.1