2026 United Rentals Driven to Serve 250 Betting Race Picks

Date/Time: Saturday June 20th, 2026. 5:00PM (EST)
Where: San Diego Naval Base Coronado
TV: CW

The first race of the weekend at the San Diego Naval Base Coronado did not disappoint on Friday. The Craftsman Truck Series put on an excellent display of racing in the NAVY 250 which featured numerous chaotic late-race restarts. The race featured a little bit of everything from strategy, to wild restarts, and nearly produced a big surprise winner in Tyler Reif. Instead, Layne Riggs brought home the victory in what will be known as the first race on the San Diego Naval Base Coronado. However, this weekend’s festivities are far from over. On Saturday, the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series will get their opportunity to tackle the monstrous 3.4 mile layout, known as the Qualcomm Circuit, with the running of the United Rentals Driven to Serve 250!

In yesterday’s Truck Series preview, I discussed the difficulty of handicapping races at the Coronado Street Course specifically in the Truck Series because that specific series rarely competes at road course style venues. For the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series and the Cup Series, I believe we will have much better data to relay on from a handicapping perspective. To be fair, we handicapped yesterday’s race perfectly but were just extremely unlucky. Both Chandler Smith and Kaden Honeycutt were leading on the final restart. We had Daniel Hemric at 35-1 who finished 2nd. Our H2H match-up dominated but tried to tear the wall down in the closing laps. Despite all the unfortunate, we basically broke even thanks to a couple of Top 5 bets that were able to cash. As a result, I am even more optimistic that we can strike gold over these next two races as NASCAR continues to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation.

Unlike the Truck Series’ race where we were completely blind going into race day, the O’Reilly Series had the opportunity to practice on Friday to give us our first observable laps around the Coronado Street Course. Practice was originally scheduled for 60-minutes but teams/drivers did not get a full 60-minute session because Brandon Jones wrecked hard in the early moments of practice which required significant repairs to one of the retaining walls. With that being said, I still believe practice shed light on the drivers that will be tough to beat on Saturday. Both Austin Green and Brent Crews posted laps that were nearly 1.5 seconds better than the field. Crews was already the driver that many were speculating would be the guy to beat on Saturday and it definitely appears to be trending in that direction as we go into tomorrow’s race!

Handicapping San Diego

In yesterday’s preview, I discussed that the Coronado Street Course is an absolute beast of a layout. The 3.4 mile layout has numerous 90 degree turns, turning both right and left. There are areas of the circuit that test nearly every road/street course skill set imaginable. For those reasons, we will put heavy emphasis towards looking at drivers’ resumes, prior road course performances, and the equipment that they will be piloting in effort to determine the drivers that may be worthy of betting consideration. The good news for bettors is that there are not any Cup Series drivers competing in Saturday’s United Rentals Driven to Serve 250 which means this race will be settled among the O’Reilly Series’ regulars!

Practice Observations and Performance Metrics

As mentioned above, Austin Green put down the fastest lap in practice on Friday with a speed of 90.330mph. Green edged out Brent Crews for the top spot. Austin Hill laid down a very solid lap at 89.845mph but there was a relatively sizable drop-off to William Sawalich and Carson Kvapil who rounded out the top 5 times in speed. While we would normally look at driver averages for consistency, only a handful of drivers ran at least 5 consecutive laps. After all, a single lap on this circuit takes over two-minutes therefore we did not have many drivers attempting to compile a lot of back to back laps at full speed. Among the 10 or so drivers that did run a handful of laps or more consecutively, Austin Hill, Anthony Alfredo, and Jesse Love were among the top drivers in speed on the 5-lap average charts. With that said, it’s probably easier to point out the drivers that were struggling which included the likes of Justin Allgaier, Corey Day, Sammy Smith, Taylor Gray, and Jeb Burton among others.

Obviously, we do not want to overreact to Saturday’s practice speeds. After all, there were some drivers that were not giving 100% and were just trying to put together some solid laps. Therefore, I think it is important for handicappers/bettors to really pay attention towards how drivers have performed at prior road course style layouts. Don’t worry, if you don’t have the time to look through prior data, I have already done the hard work. I have compiled the last 5 road/street course races for the O’Reilly Series and excluded the Cup Series drivers which won all of those races. The remaining data among the O’Reilly Series regulars should give us direct insight into the drivers that should be competing for a win on Saturday, given they can figure out this new layout and get the most of their skill set.

Driver	Average Rating
Brent Crews	117.8
Justin Allgaier	103
Sam Mayer	98.2
Sammy Smith	98.1
Austin Hill	97.8
Jesse Love	91.9
Carson Kvapil	87.6
Taylor Gray	85
William Sawalich	84.1
Brandon Jones	84.1
Nick Sanchez	82.4
Rajah Caruth	81.8
Austin Green	79.3
Sheldon Creed	76.7
Corey Day	73.9

Betting Targets

As you can see from practice and the data metrics above, Brent Crews is starting to stand out by a significant margin which is really impressive when you consider all of those metrics are from a rookie. Either way, Crews was really fast on Saturday and is likely the best road/street course talent in the field now that Connor Zilisch is in the Cup Series. Behind Crews, it really becomes a guessing game to identify the drivers that could challenge for the victory. We know the restarts will be crazy so opportunities will be there if drivers can be in the top couple of rows. So far this weekend, I have really liked the speed from Austin Hill. Hill has been an underrated road course talent but is hitting on nearly every handicapping metric. For that reason, Hill is my most confident “dark horse” since Crews is the heavy favorite.

I am eager to see how qualifying unfolds on Saturday when drivers are truly giving it 100%. I don’t think Justin Allgaier or Sam Mayer are nearly as bad as their practice times may suggest. More importantly if some drivers have poor qualifying efforts, we could get much better value in betting odds and more betting targets could come into the picture. As things currently sit, betting odds are pretty conservative. However if you shop around for odds, you can find guys like William Sawalich and Austin Green who are both in the 15-1 range. To be fair, I believe both drivers are better H2H targets than betting targets for the outright win. With that said, I still expect both drivers to compete on Saturday. If you are looking for even deeper options for prop bets or potential fantasy fliers, Rajah Caruth and Brandon Jones are currently being disrespected in terms of betting odds following slow starts to the weekend.